🟡 Chinese company delays release of AI model weights, hackers use autonomous agents to compromise Taiwanese agencies, Trump cuts US participation in military exercises with South Korea || Global Risk
Executive summary
Technology and AI: A Chinese open-source AI company is delaying the release of model weights for the first time, citing cyber risks. Anthropic won’t release what it calls “Model 2”. Bernie Sanders says the US Senate could force US companies to pause AI development.
Will the US Senate succeed in pausing AI development in the US before 2029, absent a treaty with China? Our forecasters think there’s a 5.2% (2% to 10%) chance, which rises to 19% (12% to 30%) conditional on a treaty.
Will a Google DeepMind model be among the top 3 models at the end of 2026, according to Epoch’s capability index? Forecasters believe there’s a 9.6% (5% to 15%) probability.
Geopolitics: Trump ordered US participation in joint military exercises with South Korea to be cut. Poland says it thwarted a Russian plot to kill an American citizen in Warsaw. Trump threatened to declare the Strait of Hormuz part of US territory.
What is the largest number of deaths (civilian and/or military) that Russia will inflict in a NATO country in a single incident before August 15, 2027? Our forecasters’ 90% confidence interval is 0 to 20, with the 50th percentile falling in between zero and one deaths.
Biorisk: The number of confirmed deaths in the Ebola outbreak reached 2327 deaths globally, up from 1916 last week. The WHO director-general said that the Ebola outbreak is on track to become the largest ever.
How many confirmed Bundibugyo ebolavirus deaths will be reported by the end of 2026? Our forecasters’ aggregate estimate is 5.1K to 42K, with a 50th percentile point at 12.8K.
Climate: It is looking increasingly likely that the current El Niño event will be historic. It could push 49M more people into acute hunger, and some worry that it could push the Amazon rainforest past a tipping point.
Technology and artificial intelligence
Many LLM APIs send secret reasoning traces to the client in an encrypted form. The encryption used is the same for all models, including easy-to-jailbreak models like Claude Haiku. Third-party researchers used these two facts to read the hidden reasoning traces of all frontier closed models. Working with these traces, the researchers obtained a range of interesting results normally not possible, including a discovery of how easy it is to distill reasoning. This hints at the possibility that Chinese models may have used similar hacks to distill American models, as evidenced by the similarity of Kimi K3 outputs to Claude outputs.
The study is inspired by an earlier blogpost, which found that users could derive some information from the encrypted CoT blocks across different sessions, on different accounts, and (in the case of OpenAI) across different models, with the implication that a single global encryption key was in use (rather than individual keys for each individual account). An X user claims that the hole was still open as of Wednesday.
China-linked hackers used a highly autonomous multi-agent system to hack accounts associated with Taiwan’s government and its nuclear safety agency.
xAI released its latest model, Grok 4.6. It is significantly better than past Grok models, likely as a result of SpaceX’s Cursor acquisition, which has now been finalized. But, we note that at least Anthropic has even better unreleased models.
Anthropic is reportedly planning a $2 trillion initial public offering (IPO) in October, which would be the largest ever. Anthropic also says it won’t externally release a model known as “Model 2”, which it says is more powerful than Mythos. However, the company does use this model internally, for coding and data generation, among other things. Claude models made probabilistic progress on the Riemann hypothesis.
Meanwhile, Google DeepMind is falling even further down in the rankings, and the firm has seen a string of high-level departures. Forecasters estimate that there is an aggregate 9.6% (5% to 15%) probability that a Google DeepMind model will be among the top 3 models at the end of 2026, according to Epoch’s capability index. They note that their models are currently below even some Chinese models, but that Google would have enough talent and compute to do so if it prioritized this goal, and that there have been a few twists and turns at the frontier throughout.
Democrats in the US House of Representatives sent letters to OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, asking them to account for the recent cybersecurity incidents involving their respective companies’ models. Last week, we reported that fifteen Republican attorneys general from across the US demanded that Altman preserve records related to the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident.
Meanwhile, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont called on US tech companies to pause AI development, warning: “If you do not take appropriate action now, my colleagues and I in the U.S. Senate will.” Our forecasters think there’s a 5.2% (2% to 10%) chance that the US Senate will pause frontier AI development in the US before 2029, absent a treaty with China. With a treaty, forecasters become more optimistic, giving this possibility a 19% (12% to 30%) probability, noting that a treaty would weaken the AI race argument in some scenarios, and that a treaty with China would also be informative about the US orientation towards risk rather than causative of such a pause.
The White House may expand its AI framework to include open-weight models, putting pressure on their creators to submit them for testing by the US government before their release. It also created a new program which will allow vetted US firms to conduct offensive cyber operations for the purpose of combating foreign cyber crime.
Frontier AI labs are rolling out watermarking at scale, bound by European Union regulations that aim to make it easier for people to tell whether AI has been used in an output.
And: Stripe has signed a deal to buy OpenRouter for more than $7B. Amazon plans to build the largest gas power plant – and likely the largest individual source of pollution – in the US to power a 7.7 GW data center in Texas. In the first half of 2026, 97% of global shipments of humanoid robots were from Chinese manufacturers. China-based Z.ai claimed that its latest open-source model, GLM 5.3, approaches frontier models when it comes to cyber capabilities. Notably, the company said it will delay the public release of the model’s weights for two weeks.
Geopolitics
Middle East
Trump threatened to declare the Strait of Hormuz “territory of the United States”.
White House officials and Treasury Secretary Bessent reportedly convinced Trump that increased sanctions against Iran would force the regime to negotiate. Bessent said that he would announce significant new measures this week.
Israel’s military plans to transfer law enforcement duties in the occupied West Bank to the police. The IDF has been unwilling or unable to prevent some settler attacks on Palestinians, but the Vice-President of the State of Palestine suggests that the move is part of the creeping annexation of the West Bank by Israel.
The US brokered a deal with Syria and Israel to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to remove nuclear material related to a nuclear reactor used in Syria under the Assad regime.
United States
ICE will outfit its agents with gloves capable of delivering an electric shock (video here) to people the agents deem to be resisting arrest. The gloves are to be delivered to ICE by the end of March 2027.
The US has lost about 25% of its MQ-9 Reaper drones in the Iran war. The drones are used to conduct both surveillance and strikes.
Europe
Poland says it thwarted a Russian plot to kill an American citizen of Ukrainian descent in Warsaw, the latest provocation by Russia in a “wave of disruption” across Europe. The AP maps incidents here, e.g., a plot to kill the Rheinmetall CEO back in 2024.
Our forecasters’ 90% confidence interval for the largest number of deaths (civilian and/or military) that Russia will inflict in a NATO country in a single incident before August 15, 2027 is 0 to 20, with the 50th percentile- falling between zero and one deaths.
NATO shot down a suspected Russian drone over Romania, and Romania destroyed Russian Gerbera drones drifting in the Black Sea near a major Romanian offshore gas project. NATO jets also shot down a foreign drone flying over Latvia; authorities stated that the drone had entered Latvian airspace as a result of “Russian electromagnetic warfare.” Fires triggered explosions at two munitions plants, one in Italy and one in Bulgaria, that produced munitions for Ukraine.
A week ago, a drone crashed and exploded in Moldova, and the Moldovan president condemned Russia over the incident. In general, Russia is waging a campaign to destabilize Moldova, reports the NYT.
Russia is using increasingly coercive tactics to recruit troops both within and outside Russia. It is also expanding training of foreign journalists, including in the use of AI, likely to facilitate a long-term strategy of shaping media narratives to align with Kremlin messaging.
Ukraine carried out more than two dozen attacks on power plants in regions, including Crimea, that have been occupied by Russia. Ukraine also claimed to have hit a Russian military airfield and a manufacturing facility for rockets that are being used to launch a new Russian communication satellite network akin to Starlink, which will become “central… to Russian military operations,” according to retired US Maj. Gen. Mick Ryan.
In addition to record heat waves and wildfires, widespread drought is taking a toll across large parts of Europe. German chemical companies on the Rhine River are starting to declare force majeure because the river level is too low for goods to be delivered. EU agricultural losses are mounting; the “Rock of Starvation” has emerged from the Danube River in Budapest, and “hunger stones” with carved inscriptions are being exposed in many rivers. Romania is shutting down the last working reactor at its only nuclear power plant, as the level of the Danube River, which is used to cool the reactor, falls too low.
Latin America
Colombia and Honduras have joined Ecuador and Guatemala to allow joint military operations with the US military within their borders.
Asia
Trump ordered the Pentagon to cut back US participation in joint military exercises with South Korea scheduled to start on August 17, writing on Truth Social that, “These exercises are not only costly... but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful.” He also complained that South Korea had not helped the US in its war on Iran. Forecasters think that this is a big deal, and that it is a practical effect of US exhaustion as a result of the Iran war that signals weakness to allies and enemies. Forecasters also wonder whether the move represents a shift in the Trump administration’s foreign policy away from engagement in Asia, in a worldview that divides the world into spheres of influence.
South Korea has proposed to hold talks with North Korea to officially end its war with the north.
Kazakhstan is flexing its increasing geopolitical power. In late July, Ukraine had targeted several tankers loading Kazakh oil at a terminal in the Russian port of Novorossiysk. The terminal was closed, and Kazakhstan was forced to cut oil production. But Kazakhstan did not want to see its oil shipments (through Russia) caught up in the war on Ukraine. Following a call to Zelenskyy from US VP Vance, Ukraine has halted further strikes on oil tankers loading oil from Kazakhstan at their Black Sea terminal. US companies (including some linked to members of the Trump and Lutnick families) are investing in rare earths mining in Kazakhstan, with US government financial support, as the US seeks to pivot from its dependence on China for the materials. Russia, China and the US are vying for influence in the region, over fresh water access, oil exports, rare earths, and the AI race, and the US has sought to increase its influence in Kazakhstan, in particular.
Oceania
Two undersea cables were cut near Western Australia following suspicious activity by a nearby vessel.
Africa
The UAE reportedly paid an estimated $50 million ransom to free an Emirati citizen seized by al Qaeda-linked militants in Mali in late 2025; a Pakistani citizen and an Iranian citizen were also freed. That $50M largely went to fund the militant groups’ activities in the Sahel this year, including its military advances in Mali; a portion also went to al Qaeda in Yemen and to the organization’s leadership, likely in Iran or Afghanistan.
In western Libya, multiple drone strikes on an oil facility and power plant in the city of Zawiya caused massive fires; no group has claimed responsibility. While separate groups rule the eastern and western parts of Libya, tensions are flaring within western Libya, between the government of western Libya and a warlord who controls Zawiya. A car bomb also killed a senior military officer in Benghazi, in eastern Libya.
In Sudan, the rebel RSF forces resumed attacks on al-Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan province, as the RSF continues its slow push towards the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. Eight drones struck targets in al-Obeid, and drone strikes took place in Khartoum and another nearby city as well. The ongoing fighting has pushed al-Obeid towards a severe humanitarian crisis.
In South Sudan, more than 650k refugees are at risk of losing all food aid within weeks because of a severe lack of funding at the UN World Food Programme.
Over 178k African migrants have left South Africa over the past few months following government crackdowns and sometimes violent protests, as the country’s official unemployment rate rose slightly to 33.6% in the second quarter of 2026.
Economy
Nvidia announced that it had signed agreements with six Wall Street firms to provide approximately $500B of third-party capital to finance AI data centers “at attractive rates for Nvidia customers.” The deal very creatively allows Nvidia’s GPUs to be used as collateral for loans in a way that will also help to sustain demand for Nvidia chips as they age, and which will make such loans more palatable to more risk-averse investors.
A Chinese company has launched the first regular container shipping service through the Arctic, from China to the UK, calling the shipping route the “Ice Silk Road.”
Biorisk
The number of confirmed deaths in the Ebola outbreak reached 2327 deaths globally (including 2 from Uganda), up from 1918 last week. The DRC reported a death in a new province. The WHO director-general said that the outbreak is on track to surpass the 2014-2016 outbreak, the world’s largest Ebola outbreak ever, in size.
Our forecasters’ aggregate estimate for the number of confirmed Bundibugyo ebolavirus deaths reported by the end of 2026 is 5.1K to 42K, with a 50th percentile point at 12.8K. On the one hand, forecasters note that the rate of growth has slightly decreased, from a 1.3x growth week on week to about a 1.2x growth. But, on the other hand, the fraction of Ebola deaths that is tested could be somewhat small, and that fraction could even be shrinking. And, rapid tests should become somewhat widely available over the coming months, and that could help to increase testing.
Climate and Nature
It’s looking increasingly likely that the strength of the current El Niño will be historic – the strongest in 150 years. Roughly through next March, parts of the world are expected to see much less precipitation than usual, while other areas are likely to see far more, resulting in droughts, floods, crop failures, wildfires, changing storm patterns, and likely lives lost.
A leading California researcher urges people in California to consider getting flood insurance. Some brief research suggests that such insurance costs at most a few thousand dollars per home, likely making it a good deal this year.
The UN warns that the 2026-2027 El Niño could push 49M more people into acute hunger. However, compared with the historic El Niño in 1877-1878, in which perhaps an estimated 3-4% of the world’s population died (made far worse by European colonial actions), the world’s food system is much more prepared and resilient today, thanks to global food surpluses and modern agricultural practices.
The current El Niño is already causing reduced chlorophyll production at the bottom of the ocean food chain.
El Niño events often cause severe droughts in the Amazon rainforest, on top of increasing warming and drying caused by climate change. The Amazon has not likely fully recovered from droughts during the most recent El Niño, in 2023-24. Some researchers are concerned that a super El Niño might push the Amazon rainforest past a tipping point, causing drought and wildfires to spread irreversibly and converting rainforest into savannah and degraded woodlands. Over decades, the Amazon would change from a carbon sink into a carbon source, and loss of the rainforest would dramatically reduce rainfall across South America, in addition to causing catastrophic loss of biodiversity. On the other hand, at least one forecaster feels that warnings of a tipping point haven’t had a great track record over the last few decades.
Satellite data show that the Earth’s energy imbalance (EEI), the surplus energy that the planet absorbs but does not re-emit, is growing fast. This increase might also exacerbate the effects of the current El Niño by increasing upper-ocean heating.
A new study finds that the global temperatures at which the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which is a conveyor belt for heat throughout the Atlantic, can be expected to collapse or weaken depend on the rate at which temperatures are changing rather than on the temperatures alone. This is because the AMOC has a stabilizing mechanism that operates at rates slower than current warming rates. The authors note that consequently, “limiting the rate of emissions is critical for reducing the risk of an AMOC collapse.”
Over 1M people were evacuated from their homes in eastern China, including Shanghai, in advance of typhoon Dolphin’s arrival last Monday. The typhoon brought torrential rain and flooding across its path.