Celebrating the Coronation of King Charles III and Queen Consort Camilla at the British Consulate General Team in San Francisco
By Editor
San Francisco, CA, May 6, 2023—To mark the coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla at Westminster Abbey, the British Consulate General in San Francisco gathered diplomats, scientists, and members of the Bay Area's international community at Grace Cathedral around coronation weekend. Among the guests was Mauritz Kop, a Stanford legal scholar whose work on responsible quantum technology and trustworthy artificial intelligence placed a science-and-technology thread quietly at the center of an otherwise ceremonial afternoon.
Celebrating the Coronation of King Charles III at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco (illustrative editorial image).
A coronation, screened across an ocean
The celebration paired pageantry with proximity. Footage from the Royal Coronation ceremony in London was screened for the assembled guests, and the Saint Helena Unified School District choir performed British music old and new. The event was, by contemporaneous accounts, a warm and somewhat informal gathering: festive attire, members of the diplomatic corps, and the easy conversation that consular receptions are designed to make possible.
It is exactly that informality that gives such occasions their second life. A coronation party is, on its surface, a cultural moment. But for the people in the room—government representatives from an array of countries—it is also a rare unstructured space in which the substance of policy can be raised without the apparatus of a formal summit. On this afternoon, that substance was the governance of emerging technology.
Mauritz Kop's LinkedIn post from the San Francisco Coronation Event at Grace Cathedral, May 6, 2023.
Science diplomacy in a cathedral
Kop used the occasion to discuss, with government representatives from several countries, pathways toward responsible quantum technology (RQT) and trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI)—the same questions that animate his scholarship. Conversations of this kind are the connective tissue of science diplomacy: the deliberate use of scientific cooperation to build relationships and inform policy across borders. They rarely produce a communiqué. What they produce is shared vocabulary—an agreement, reached informally, on what the hard questions are.
The hard questions for responsible quantum technology are genuinely interdisciplinary. Quantum computing exploits superposition and entanglement to process information in ways classical machines cannot, and the no-cloning theorem—the fact that an arbitrary unknown quantum state cannot be perfectly copied—reshapes what secure communication and many forms of intercept attack can even mean. Those physical facts have direct consequences for cryptography, for national security, and for the legal and ethical frameworks that will have to keep pace with the technology. Raising them with diplomats from multiple governments, in a room built for conversation rather than negotiation, is precisely how interdisciplinary governance work begins.
The people who make the room
Diplomacy of this kind depends on hosts who understand that a guest list is also an agenda. Among the government representatives Kop spoke with were Dutch Innovation Consul Walter de Wit and Consul General Dirk Janssen—a Dutch presence that reflects the close transatlantic ties between the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States on questions of technology policy.
The event itself was organized by the UK Science & Innovation Network, the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office's program for connecting British science and innovation with partners abroad. Kop publicly thanked Joe White MBE, then His Majesty's Consul General in San Francisco, and Florence Chaverneff of the UK Science & Innovation Network, for putting the gathering together. That a coronation reception became a venue for technology-policy conversation is no accident: the Science & Innovation Network exists to make precisely those conversations happen, and a celebratory afternoon turned out to be one of its better instruments.
Why a cultural moment matters for governance
It would be easy to read the afternoon as nothing more than ceremony—a screen, a choir, a cathedral. But the value of cultural diplomacy lies in what it makes possible afterward. The relationships formed at a coronation party are the ones that can be drawn on later, when a working group needs a counterpart in another government, when a draft principle needs a reality check from a different legal tradition, or when a fast-moving technology outpaces the institutions meant to govern it.
Responsible quantum technology and trustworthy AI will not be governed by any single country acting alone. They will be governed, if they are governed well, by networks of people who trust one another enough to disagree productively. Sometimes those networks are built in conference halls. Sometimes they are built in a cathedral, on a celebratory afternoon, between a screening of a coronation and a choir's last song.
Last updated: June 6, 2026.