Scaffolding covered the stately home at the heart of Bletchley Park as the Second World War code-breaking centre was spruced up to host the masters of Silicon Valley for the government’s inaugural global artificial intelligence safety summit.

Spread over two days next week, the first hosted by Michelle Donelan, the science, innovation and technology secretary, is the one that most companies, along with her global counterparts, will attend. The second will be led by Rishi Sunak, angled towards the political implications of the revolution in AI.

Bletchley Park was the British forces’ intelligence centre during the Second World War, where the country’s best codebreakers were based

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Discussing perhaps the world’s most exciting technology with some of the richest and most powerful global companies has attracted an illustrious guest list. The chief executives of OpenAI — the maker of ChatGPT — Google Deepmind and Anthropic, three