Israel preparing to take over Gaza City, ceasefire in Ukraine unlikely to happen soon, Trump deploying National Guard in DC, GPT-5 released | Global Risks Weekly Roundup #32/2025

Status: green

Executive summary

Key items this week are:

• Economy and trade: Trump’s new tariff rates for most of the world took effect on August 7. Trump partially followed through on threats of secondary tariffs on Russia’s trading partners if there wasn’t a stop to the Ukraine war by last Friday, by placing an additional 25% tariff on India, which has been buying Russian oil, starting near the end of this month.

• Geopolitics: Putin and US envoy Witkoff met in Moscow to discuss conditions for a ceasefire in Ukraine. Trump and Putin plan to meet in Alaska on August 15 to discuss a path towards a ceasefire, without Ukraine. Israel’s security cabinet approved a plan to take over Gaza City. Trump ordered the Washington, DC National Guard to patrol the streets of Washington, DC and federalized the DC police force.

• Biorisks: RFK Jr cut $500M in funding for 22 mRNA vaccine projects, including a potential vaccine for H5N1. H5N1 was detected in a six-year-old Cambodian girl. 8K people have been infected with chikungunya in a severe outbreak in China.

• Tech and AI: OpenAI released GPT-5 and two open-source models. GPT-5 is the first OpenAI model classified as “high capability” for being used to create biological weapons.

• And more: Over 5B starfish killed over the last 10y by bacteria that are more common in warm water. The die-off had a ripple effect on kelp forests because starfish eat sea-urchins, which eat kelp.

Forecasters estimate a 15% probability of a ceasefire in Ukraine of any duration by October 1, and a 33% chance by the end of the year. Forecasters give OpenAI a 43% chance of being in the lead by the end of August, and Google a 50% chance.

Our status is at green, representing that we aren’t seeing signals of incoming global catastrophic risks over the short-term.

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Biorisk

RFK Jr cut $500M in funding for 22 mRNA vaccine projects, including a potential vaccine for H5N1. These cuts hamper progress to develop vaccines against existing human diseases and future pandemics, and also make the US less prepared to respond to an act of bioterrorism. This step likely increases the risk and potential severity of a bird flu pandemic. We previously covered funding for mRNA vaccines as a promising move to improve biosecurity.

Bird flu was confirmed in a six-year-old Cambodian girl who lived in a village where a lot of chickens died, the 15th confirmed infection in the country this year. In the US, H5N1 was detected in another dairy cattle herd in California.

The mosquito-borne chikungunya virus infected 8,000 people in a severe outbreak in China. The disease is generally not deadly, but extremely painful.

Ghana approved a breakthrough malaria drug for babies, but further research and deployment are on hold after US funding cuts.

A human and mouse study, published in Nature, found that low lithium levels likely help cause Alzheimer’s disease and that supplementation with certain kinds of lithium salt could prevent and treat the disease.

A paper finds that Covid, the flu and other respiratory infections increase the risk of dying of cancer for people who previously had cancer, likely by reactivating dormant cancer cells that then spread.

Geopolitics

Russia/Ukraine

Trump previously gave Russia a deadline of this past Friday to end the war in Ukraine or face severe economic sanctions, including via secondary sanctions on trading partners, such as India.

Trump did follow up with an additional 25% tariff on Indian goods scheduled to start near the end of this month, which lends some additional credibility to future such threats. Such tariffs would effectively end exports from India to the US, and the US is India’s top export market, at 18% of Indian exports and accounting for 2.2% of India’s GDP. As a result, India’s state refiners have paused purchases from Russia and started to buy more non-Russian oil.

However, the Friday deadline passed without a ceasefire agreement. Instead, Putin met with US special envoy Witkoff in Moscow ahead of the deadline and said that he would end the war in Ukraine if Ukraine gives up four provinces: Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – and Crimea. Trump and Putin plan to meet in Alaska on August 15 to discuss a path towards a ceasefire.

Zelensky responded to Putin’s plan by stating that Ukraine would not give up any territory. European leaders and Ukraine proposed that they should be involved in any negotiations to be held with Russia, and called for a ceasefire before further negotiations. The Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and Denmark agreed to purchase over $1B of US weapons for Ukraine.

Forecasters estimate a 15% (5% to 33%) chance of a ceasefire in Ukraine (of any duration) by October 1, and a 33% (15% to 55%) chance of a ceasefire by the end of the year. Forecasters comment that:

• Putin is likely playing for time and stringing Trump along again, though Trump is putting a bit more pressure on Putin this time. It does feel similar to previous periods where we thought there might have been a breakthrough, with similar headlines and details about a deal, but it fizzled out.

• The prior per Laplace’s rule of succession would be 3%/10% for the two time periods, but I’m significantly adjusting upwards because pressure on India seems like a promising indicator.

• Putin’s plan reportedly demands that Ukraine cede land that Russia has not gained in battle, in exchange for a ceasefire but no guarantee of a permanent end to hostilities. A fear is that a Ukrainian rejection of such a capitulation would be used by Vance and Trump to cast Ukraine as the obstacle to peace and to shift the blame away from Russia and back onto Zelensky. This aligns with Vance’s desire to decouple the US from support for Ukraine.

• Putin wants what Ukraine won’t give him, at least not likely this year. It remains to be determined which side will win the drone war and have more long-term stamina, but for now, Ukraine and its European backers are in no mood to roll over. They also recognize that while a ceasefire would give Ukrainian forces a chance to regroup, it would do the same for Russia as well.

Russian Press Secretary Peskov said that the country would no longer adhere to a self-imposed moratorium on where it deploys land-based intermediate-range missiles that can carry nuclear warheads, blaming the US and NATO for their plans to place similar weapons in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. However, Reuters pointed out that, “Western security analysts said the "moratorium", in fact, was long dead, if it had ever existed”.

Middle East

Israel and Gaza

Netanyahu said¹ that Israel intends to take control of all of Gaza.

Q: Will Israel take control of all of Gaza?
Netanyahu: We intend to, in order to, a assure our security, remove Hamas [from] there, enable the population [of Gaza] to be free, and to pass it to civilian governance that is not Hamas, and not anyone advocating the destruction of Israel…

…
Q: Are you saying today that you intend to take control of the entire 26 mile Gaza strip, as it was 20 years ago to this month in 2005?
Netanyahu: Well, we don't want to keep it. We want to have a security perimeter. We don't want to govern it. We don't want to be there as a governing body. We want to hand it over to Arab forces that will govern it properly without threatening us, and giving Gazans a good life, that's not possible with Hamas.

Following pushback from military leadership about the exhaustion of reservists, Israel’s security cabinet approved a plan to take over Gaza City. Satellite images show that Israel is massing troops on its border with Gaza in preparation for a ground invasion.

Germany will suspend exports of arms to Israel that could be used in Gaza. And Netanyahu’s government voted unanimously to fire the attorney general who is prosecuting him for corruption, but Israel’s Supreme Court issued an injunction blocking them from doing so.

Iran

The Economist summarizes political changes in Iran since the US and Israeli strikes: Khamenei appears in public much less often, the question of his successor has become more salient, and the regime is promoting nationalist themes and loosening social restrictions, by allowing not wearing headscarves in parts of Tehran, or not cracking down on a Persian version of Love Island (produced in Turkey). But at the same time, the regime is reappointing elderly conservatives to positions of power, pushing out reformists, and executing ever more prisoners.

In the meantime, Iran is experiencing both power and energy shortages, which are making the regime even more unpopular. The two shortages are related: most methods of generating electricity use a lot of water, and so Iran’s use of natural gas to power its grid doesn’t play nicely with its current dire water shortage.

Schools and businesses across Iran are closing for at least two hours each day, and sometimes an entire day at a time, because of power outages that have been ongoing since December. The country faced drastic power outages last winter because of natural gas shortages; scarce gas was provided first to heat homes, and not enough remained for generating electricity.

Iranian President Pezeshkian warned the country at the end of July that, "In Tehran, if we cannot manage and people do not cooperate in controlling consumption, there won't be any water in dams by September or October”. Even public toilets in Tehran are closed.

Forecasters are uncertain about the speed, form, magnitude or nature of upcoming political change in Iran. Some view the regime as unstable and likely to fall, while others consider a shift to a more moderate version of theocracy more likely.

Recently, Iran set up a new defence council that will be chaired by Pezeshkian. Khamenei doesn’t seem to be involved, perhaps offering an early sign that he will be sidelined, even if he doesn’t lose power formally.

United States

On Monday, Trump ordered 800 Washington, DC National Guard troops to be deployed in the nation’s capital and the DC police to be federalized, in an effort to fight crime. Trump said, “I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor, and worse…. This is Liberation Day in D.C., and we’re going to take our capital back.” This follows Trump ordering federal law enforcement agencies last Thursday to patrol the streets of Washington, DC for seven days, after a former DOGE staffer was violently attacked. However, violent crime in the capital was at a 30-year low in January, according to the DOJ.

Trump called for a new federal census, before the midterms, that would exclude undocumented immigrants. However, this would likely violate the Census Act and potentially the Constitution. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution states that, ”Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State,” and the Census Bureau has long interpreted that to mean that all persons residing in the US, regardless of legal status, should be counted to determine how presidents and members of Congress are elected.

The Library of Congress Constitution Annotated website that posts the US Constitution was found to have omitted several portions of text, including those pertaining to the right to habeas corpus, the foreign emoluments clause, the militia clauses, and limits on Congressional and state powers. The Library of Congress said that the text had been omitted because of a “coding error” and subsequently restored the text.

The American Accountability Foundation, with ties to senior White House officials, published a “DEI Watchlist”, seeking to identify employees of the federal workforce most driving DEI initiatives. Some forecasters think that the initiative has a point (e.g., past DEI advisors are likely not invested in implementing Trump’s agenda, and his goals were partially disobeyed in his previous administration), while other forecasters pay more attention to the instances of harassment resulting from the list’s publication on the internet and its sometimes inflammatory labels, such as “subversive,” and highlight the virtues of civil service, civil service protections and civil rights protections.

A week ago, Texas Democratic lawmakers left the state to prevent a quorum for voting from being reached, in order to block a Republican attempt to vote to redistrict the state to gain five more seats in Congress. It seems that the FBI might be involved in finding the absent lawmakers, but the White House denied that the FBI would be involved specifically in arresting them. Still, the involvement is iffy; the federal government playing in state politics could be a dangerous slippery slope and risks violating the 10th amendment to the Constitution. Moreover, in response, California Gov. Newsom today told Trump to “Stand down or CA will fight fire with fire”, presumably referring to the idea of redistricting California to bring the number of Republican representatives down from 9.

And: The DOJ launched an investigation into government officials allegedly linking Trump to election interference by Russia in 2016-17. And the National Weather Service, seeking to reverse DOGE cuts, will be hiring 450 staff.

Asia-Pacific

China is deploying unprecedented numbers of ice-breaker ships near Alaska. It is also increasingly integrating its railway system with military logistics, looking into ways to disable the Starlink constellation, and conducting maritime exercises with Russia.

During a visit to India, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. predicted that the Philippines would be drawn into a war over Taiwan, though he was at least in part referring to the need to evacuate Filipino nationals from the island. In a previous report, we noted that Japan had told its companies that they would be on their own in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The question of how to evacuate the approximately 1 million Southeast Asian nationals from Taiwan in the event of a war was explored in a recent unofficial war game, organized by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies\, which suggested that Singapore might be the only country in the region with the military, technical, logistic and diplomatic heft to successfully execute such evacuations.

Europe and the Caucasus

Spain plans to purchase European fighter jets, rather than US F-35s, to upgrade its aging fleet.

Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a peace agreement in the White House and agreed to open a transit corridor through Armenia. The agreement illustrates the reduced influence of both Russia and Iran in the region, and hope for increased cooperation between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Africa

Parts of Sudan face famine as supplies are cut off, and Sudan accused the UAE of bringing in Colombian mercenaries to support the RSF. Egyptian and Sudanese leaders discussed cooperation and the Nile River during a meeting in Cairo. A ceasefire in the DRC is in doubt as Rwanda-backed rebels kill hundreds in the Eastern DRC.

And a study finds that militant Islamists have killed over 22K in Africa over the last year.

Tech and AI

OpenAI GPT-5 release

OpenAI released GPT-5. A couple weeks ago, forecasters assigned a 62% chance to GPT-5 being released by the end of August. METR estimates that GPT-5 has a 50% time horizon of around 2 hours 15 minutes, above o3’s 1 hour 30 minutes. This is consistent with a doubling time in task length of around 7 months. METR reported that the model sometimes perceives that it is in a testing environment, sometimes correctly identifying that it was being tested by METR.

It is the first OpenAI model that has been classified as “high capability” for being used to create biological weapons. A model is considered to have “high” capability for biorisk when it can meaningfully assist a novice in creating known biological threat agents.

Users were initially disappointed with the performance of ChatGPT-5. Altman later wrote that its alternator was broken, which made ChatGPT-5 seem much dumber. The alternator refers to a mechanism that OpenAI placed on its chat interface that switches between models and chooses a weaker and cheaper model to respond to many prompts.

Following the release, Polymarket gave Google a 78% chance of having the best AI model by August:

Forecasters don’t have $4M on the line but/and are less confident than Polymarket; they give a 50% (35% to 70%) chance to Google being in the lead by the end of August, and OpenAI a 43% (20% to 55%).

One employee claims that it isn’t the company’s best model, and that they have “one better and one in training right now”.

OpenAI open-source model release

OpenAI released their first open-source models. They trained the model on filtered data, and later fine-tuned a version of the model on biological, chemical, and cybersecurity relevant data in order to test whether attackers could use gpt-oss to produce a model that reaches “high” capability under OpenAI’s preparedness framework. They didn’t find that any of these open-source models breached the threshold and so determined that gpt-oss was safe to release.

But often, new capabilities of modern AI systems are discovered long after public deployment, and their preparedness framework only addresses a small number of enumerated risks.

Semiconductor tariffs

Corporations are giving gifts to the administration, in efforts to gain tariff concessions and market share. NVIDIA and AMD agreed to give the administration 15% of the revenue from their sales of advanced chips to China. AWS gave the Trump administration a $1B coupon. OpenAI is giving ChatGPT access to all federal employees through next year for $1 per agency.

Apple’s Tim Cook visited the White House to announce an increase of $100B in Apple’s commitment to US manufacturing, which now totals $600B, and gave Trump a gift with a large gold base².

In that same meeting, Trump said that he plans to impose an approximately 100% tariff on chips and semiconductors, unless companies plan to build manufacturing capabilities in the US, a condition which so far seems fairly ambiguous. This effectively waives tariffs on Apple semiconductor imports. The market reacted positively to this move, viewing it as a way for companies to get around broader tariffs on related products.

And: DeepMind announced Genie 3, a world-model AI, which produces interactive video in real time. Two Chinese nationals were arrested in California for bypassing export controls for tens of millions of dollars worth of chips.

Economy

Tariffs

Trump’s tariffs took effect on August 7 for most countries. The Yale Budget Lab reports that the average effective tariff rate will now be 17.3% after consumption shifts, the highest since 1935, during the Great Depression.

Retaliatory tariffs from the EU, due to be implemented August 7, were suspended for six months to facilitate trade negotiations. The US trade representative said last week that a tariff pause with China is likely to be extended another 90 days while negotiations continue.

Trump also imposed secondary tariffs on India, because it buys Russian oil, and on semiconductors: see the Russia/Ukraine and Tech and AI sections of this report.

Trump threatened to impose a 100% tariff rate on BRICs countries if they set up their own currency or back using another currency in international trade, in an attempt to replace the USD.

Trump announced that the US would first place a "small tariff" on pharmaceutical imports, followed by a 150% tariff within 12-18 months and eventually a 250% tariff, “because we want pharmaceuticals made in our country”.

US housing market

In June, there were a record 509k more sellers than buyers in the US housing market. Over the past two years, while the number of sellers has risen steadily to nearly pre-pandemic levels, the number of buyers has plummeted far below numbers seen before the pandemic. A falling housing market will dampen US consumer spending and economic growth.

Via Newsweek

And: China is restricting sales of rare earth metals to defense manufacturers in the West. Trump will nominate Stephen Miran to fill a temporary vacancy on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors; Miran would have a vote on the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets interest rates, and he is expected to support Trump’s calls for rate cuts. There was a brief scare that the US would place tariffs on 1kg and 100g gold bars, which would have upended gold markets, but it was soon quieted.

Climate and Nature

Scientists have figured out that a massive epidemic that killed over 5B starfish over the past decade is caused by a species of bacteria called Vibrio pectenicida, which is more common in warmer water. The die-off has had a ripple effect, because sea stars eat sea urchins, and sea urchins eat kelp; with fewer sea stars around, sea urchin populations have exploded and have eaten up to 95% of the kelp in some locations.

A new UN report finds that, “Extreme temperatures caused approximately 489,000 heat-related deaths annually between 2000 and 2019 [...] especially severe in cities due to the so-called ‘urban heat island effect’ – the over-heating of dense city areas compared with their rural surroundings”.

Wildfires have been burning in southern Europe and Turkey.

NASA is planning to end the missions of two satellites that monitor carbon dioxide and plant growth globally, although European alternatives remain.

1. Min 1:10 and onwards

2. Note that the gift is government property and that Trump will not be allowed to keep this gift after he leaves office