🟩 Airspace closed over Venezuela, Russia-Ukraine talks continue, DeepSeek reaches gold IMO level || Global Risks Weekly Roundup #48/2025

Executive summary

Top items:

• Geopolitics: Trump announced that the airspace above Venezuela has been closed, but the US has not struck Venezuelan territory. Iran’s President repeated his warning that the country’s capital may need to be relocated because of water shortages. And talks about bringing the Russia-Ukraine conflict to an end continue.

• Tech and AI: Anthropic released its latest model, Claude Opus 4.5, and says it’s getting harder to rule out that its models are crossing some dangerous thresholds. DeepSeek released a model that reached gold level in the International Mathematics Olympiad.

Forecasts:

• Forecasters believe there’s a 6.4% (5.0% to 10%) probability that at least 500K people will be evacuated from Iran’s capital Tehran by the end of January 2026.

• They think there’s a 69% (40% to 81%) chance that the US military will attack Venezuelan territory by the end of 2025.

• And they assign a 45% (29% to 70%) chance to Venezuelan President Maduro being out of power by the end of March 2026.

Geopolitics

Europe

Talks about a potential peace deal between Russia and Ukraine continue, with US officials in discussions with both sides. US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll met with Ukrainian and Russian delegations in Abu Dhabi, while US officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, met with a Ukrainian delegation in the US state of Florida.

Ukraine hit Russian oil tankers in the Black Sea.

Authorities in France arrested four people, including two Russians, on suspicions that they were spying. One of the suspects was arrested for seeking information on French economic interests.

Dutch troops opened fire on unidentified drones over an airbase in the Netherlands.

Andriy Yermak, Ukrainian President Zelensky’s chief of staff, resigned from his position following a corruption scandal.

The Americas

Latin America

Trump posted on social media, “To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.” Trump reportedly spoke with Maduro the week before, and the possibility of a future meeting between the two was discussed.

The US military buildup in the Caribbean continued last week, with the installation of a radar in Trinidad and Tobago and at least two C-5M Super Galaxy heavy-lift transport flights likely bringing in something very large; the C-5M is the largest US Air Force aircraft. Coordinated US military flights near the coast of Venezuela occurred on Monday November 24, providing practice, surveillance and reconnaissance, and pressure on the Maduro regime.

US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, visited Trinidad and Tobago on Tuesday, November 25.

Overall, forecasters think there’s a 69% (40% to 81%) chance that the US military will attack Venezuelan territory by the end of 2025, and a 45% (29% to 70%) chance that Maduro will no longer be in power in Venezuela by the end of March 2026.

United States

Two members of the West Virginia National Guard deployed to Washington, DC were shot the day before Thanksgiving; one has died. The shooter was an Afghan immigrant who had previously worked with the CIA.

Following these shootings, the Trump administration has stopped issuing visas from “Third World countries”, rumoured to include Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan and Venezuela, and has announced that all visa holders from these countries will undergo renewed scrutiny as part of an immigration crackdown. In social media posts on Thanksgiving night, Trump announced these changes and outlined a broader vision of preserving “Western Civilization” in the US by “reverse migration,” i.e., removing immigrants.

Following a NY Times article on signs that Trump is aging, forecasters discussed signs of his cognitive decline, potentially due to age-related slides towards one or more neurodegenerative diseases, including perhaps even a remote possibility of cerebellar ataxia, or a possible stroke. They pointed to his speech being more slurred and less coherent compared to 2016, and also to his wider gait as evidence of problems balancing, perhaps related to sarcopenia, but some pushed back on speculating about public figures’ medical conditions from a distance. Per the 25th Amendment, the vice-president together with a majority of the cabinet could declare the president unfit but would need the approval of two thirds of both houses of Congress if Trump were to object. However, most forecasters believe that it is extremely unlikely that the 25th Amendment would be invoked.

Middle East

Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian again warned that Iran’s capital may need to be relocated away from Tehran because of water shortages. Earlier in November, he suggested that Tehran may even need to be evacuated as early as late December if rain doesn’t fall, though these remarks prompted widespread criticism from Iranian media and a government spokesperson later rolled back the statement. At the time of writing, Tehran has only seen one day of rain in approximately two months. Forecasters believe there’s a 6.4% (5% to 10%) chance that at least 500,000 people will be evacuated from the capital by the end of January 2026.

Here is a timelapse of satellite imagery for a two dams that supplies Tehran, to give a sense:

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked Israel’s President Isaac Herzog for a pardon that would give him immunity from prosecution in the ongoing corruption case against him.

The Trump administration moved to designate “certain” Muslim Brotherhood chapters as foreign terrorist organizations.

Asia

Japan intercepted a suspected Chinese drone that was spotted flying near Yonaguni Island, which lies 70 miles away from Taiwan and is one of the Japanese islands that’s furthest from Tokyo. The US Marine Corps are also transporting supplies and equipment to the island, while Japan confirmed that it will station surface-to-air missiles there. China condemned the latter move, as tensions between Japan and China continue to simmer following remarks by the new Japanese Prime Minister that her country could intervene if China moves against Taiwan.

Donald Trump is set to visit China in April and will invite President Xi of China for a state visit later in 2026.

Former Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was sentenced to 21 years in prison after being found guilty on corruption charges, not long after she was sentenced to death for ordering a crackdown on student protesters. Bangladesh’s current government has written to India, where Sheikh Hasina currently lives in exile, demanding that she be extradited.

Africa

In the Sudan Civil War, the Sudanese government rejected a ceasefire proposal from the so-called Quad (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the United States), arguing that it was tilted in favour of the rebel Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The government also criticised the inclusion of the UAE in negotiations, alleging that Abu Dhabi has been supporting the RSF.

The RSF, in turn, seemingly proposed a unilateral three-month ceasefire, but this did not appear to materialise as they continued to attack the Kordofan region in the centre of the country in a push for more territory.

The president of Guinea-Bissau was ousted in a military coup.

Technology and artificial intelligence

Open source Chinese AI models are catching up fast to their closed-source Western counterparts. DeepSeek released a model that attained gold medalist level on the International Mathematics Olympiad. Google and OpenAI achieved this back in July, giving open-source AI a 5-6 month delay.

Anthropic released their latest model, Claude Opus 4.5, which they say is the best model in the world for coding, basing this claim partly on its performance on SWE-bench, a benchmark tracking software engineering abilities.

Anthropic also said that it’s getting harder to rule out that their models may be crossing their AI R&D-4 and CBRN-4 thresholds, where their AI R&D-4 threshold reflects the ability to fully automate an entry-level remote-only Anthropic Researcher and their CBRN-4 threshold represents the ability to substantially uplift CBRN development capabilities of moderately resourced state programs. They also report that their latest models seem to be aware that they’re being evaluated increasingly frequently, which is a concern because AIs may behave better when they think they’re being tested.

Trump signed an executive order establishing the “Genesis Mission”, which aims to boost US innovation by using data from the country’s Department of Energy national laboratories “to train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs.”

Major insurers are asking US regulators to exclude AI related liabilities from corporate policies, saying they’re too risky to insure.

Amidst debate about whether AI models will replace humans totally or have a “jagged frontier” such that they are very good in some domains but very limited in others, some forecasters agreed with this tweet pithily expressing that AI can have a jagged frontier and yet eventually be better than humans at everything.

Subscriptions to a large language model explicitly designed to enable people to commit crimes cost $50 a month, raising concerns about the misuse of AI.

Biorisk

Ethiopia’s Marburg outbreak continues to spread.

Climate and Nature

A geoengineering startup has raised $60 million to dim the sun.

An Airbus plane suddenly dropped in altitude, injuring 15 people as a result of a malfunction caused by a solar flare. You can see our past estimates of the likelihood of a very intense solar storm here.