A Node Manager’s Diary, April & May 2026

Two months in. How the Node is finding its sea-legs, and a packed June kicking off.

Bradley Royes is AI Node Manager at Foresight's Berlin Node. The Berlin Node is a new physical AI research and collaborative space at CIC Berlin, built around some of the hardest problems in frontier technology. This is a (bi)monthly update from inside the Node: what's happening, what's being learned, and what's on the horizon.

So we officially opened our Berlin and San Francisco Nodes on April 1st, and I’m writing this on June 3rd, from the airport on my way to Vision Weekend UK, which means this first diary entry covers the first two months at once: how April found a bit of rhythm, what May brought, and what the next stretch looks like, because June and July are filling up faster than I ever imagined.

I would say April was about demonstrating the Node could indeed function as a place for serious collaboration. Within the first few weeks a few rhythms are already settling in for our founding “Nodees”. Perhaps the biggest “neulichkeit” operationally was the initiation of a weekly residents day, each with a shared lunch in the middle. These have been a personal highlight, but I’ll keep it short: people work in the space together, eat together, and share what they’re working on after lunch (alongside the AI Safety Berlin folks every second week). While on the subject of operations, we finally have enough monitors, I think… someone on LinkedIn commented that researchers need n+1 monitors, and six months in I’m increasingly convinced the actual formula is closer to n×2+1..

One lunch/co-working is worth flagging. Two young researchers from Ocean Protocol stopped by, and we just happened to have two extra sandwiches. By the time our sunny courtyard lunch was over it was being explored how we might host one of their fNIRS rigs at the Node during our July workshop. None of this was planned, just a few people with adjacent interests sharing a Subway sandwich. This is the micro-magic of the Node, and an early signal I have that the format is doing something interesting. #scheduledserendipity

April also produced three Node firsts: our first agentic coding roundtable (thanks to Nodee Madeleine Parker), the first of our regular AI salons with AI researcher Justin Schenk, and SAIGE’s first-ever in-person event. SAIGE is the Safe AI Germany field-building organisation, and we’re now locked in to host their European Frontier AI Safety Day on September 5th (save the date!). AI Safety Berlin has also properly settled in, with soon-to-be 9 resident desks in Æthos next door.

May was honestly busier than I expected. And I had expected pretty busy. In the second half of the month, Aurélien Nicolas led a salon on architectures of trustable agents; Aurélien runs Inversed and is one of our Berlin grantees, working on cryptographic identity and accountability for a world where AI agents pass data between each other constantly. The very next day we hosted the DWeb Berlin Node Meetup: On the Trail to Camp, a gathering ahead of DWeb Camp 2026, co-hosted with Beth McCarthy and the Internet Archive folks. Decentralised-web people, anti-authoritarian-infrastructure people, and community-networks people, all in one room. Not to mention our AI Safety and AI for Science folks.

Yet two more happenings took place in the final days of May. On the 23rd, Kazik Pogoda ran a 12 hour workshop on building autonomous AI agents for research, the first in a series, and the first fully Nodee organized event. Awesome stuff Kazik. And on the 27th, Naomi Brockwell came through to host a masterclass on privacy best practices; Naomi runs the Ludlow Institute and NBTV, and is one of our newer Node residents in SF. This was also the first time a SF Node resident visited and hosted at a sister Node. I’d love to see this happen more and more moving forward.

Behind the events, some pretty exciting partnerships are starting to congeal, which is the less photogenic but one of my favourite parts of Node-managing. We’re supporting Edge City Esmerelda in running multi-agent experiments in SF this month. We’re the early stages of a collaborations with Futura House, the Zuzalu-adjacent popup village turned community space that’s 10 minutes drive away from the Node, and where we’ll be hosting be our pre-workshop social evening on July 17. And I spent some time at the freshly opened Medulla City, a new resilience workspace from Dark Matter Labs, Next Learning e.V., and Politics for Tomorrow; I unfortunately just missed their opening night(on May 28th), but it’s exactly the kind of place I want the Node in conversation with and I’m curious to see how we can connect our spaces.

June is going to be a lot. As I mentioned, I am writing this from Berlin’s international terminal on my way to London for Vision Weekend UK, Foresight’s first UK edition celebrating its 40th anniversary , where I’m looking forward to sharing the latest on what’s emerging in Berlin (June 5-9). On the 14th I’m speaking at the Neocypherpunk Summit back in Berlin at Funkhaus, on designing the human and activation layers of decentralised AI. And on the 18th I’m speaking again at DeSci Berlin, the decentralized-science conference run by BIO and Molecule. Then July brings the Futura House social, DWeb Camp (where I’m co-curating the Public AI track and will be on the ground all five days), and our Secure and Sovereign AI workshop (in that order). Quite stoked for July!

Two months in, and the through-line is getting clearer each week. I'd say April was about showing the Node works as a place for serious work on serious problems, May was about it starting to function as a multi-organisation hub (dare I say "Node" yet?). And June/July? We'll see.

More to come.