Sentinel minutes for week #3/2025: Trump inauguration, Iran gasps for strength, NATO defending undersea cables.

Status: Green 🟢.

Top items:

• Trump’s inauguration and the transfer of power in the US are going smoothly.

• Iran aims to bolster its strength through agreement with Russia, further investment in nuclear facilities, etc.

• NATO launches a mission to defend undersea cables in the Baltic Sea.

• OpenAI finalizes o3-mini internally—faster than o1-pro but worse.

Geopolitics

Europe

Finland says that the crew of the ship they caught after cutting a Baltic Sea undersea cable were planning to cut more cables. A Russian drone blew up inside NATO territory. Sweden's Prime Minister said that his country is neither at war nor at peace as he announced that Swedish troops would be sent to the Baltic Sea for the first time as part of surveillance efforts related to the disruption to undersea cables. This is part of a broader NATO mission to protect cables in the region.

But undersea cables are hard to defend. “You can’t put a ship over every nautical mile of pipeline or cable – it’s an impossible task,” says a NATO commander. “There are approximately 50,000 big ships out there worldwide and they can drop anchors and drag them over infrastructure.”

European imports of Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) reached record levels last year, in part due to loopholes in the EU's sanctions regime. Separately, EU shipyards (including in France and Denmark) are repairing Russian ice-class LNG tankers and offering them dry dock facilities, again due to loopholes in the bloc's sanctions regime, with carve-outs for energy transportation and ships that are not Russian-flagged. Without this maintenance work, Russia's Yamal LNG plant, situated in the far north of the country, would struggle to access crucial markets in the winter.

The German army was authorized to shoot down suspicious drones seen near military sites and other critical infrastructure, as suspicions grew of a Russian "shadow war" against the West.The Polish Prime Minister claimed that Russia has planned acts of terrorism in the air, including plots that could have brought down planes mid-flight. Sentinel has previously reported on drone sightings around military bases in Germany and Britain as well as possible acts of sabotage at distribution centres and other locations in Europe.

An aide to Putin warned that Moldova may cease to exist in 2025.

Middle East

After the defeat of its proxies, Iran is trying to somehow bolster its strength. Iran and Russia signed an agreement to strengthen military ties, Iran reinforced the security of its Natanz nuclear facility, allocated 5,000 people working to expand Bushehr nuclear plant, and sent a surveillance ship out to sea. Iran is also holding nuclear talks with Europeans. Iran also noticed that Israel tried to embed explosives within centrifuge components.

In bad news for Iran, two judges were shot and killed in its supreme court. The gunman was an Iranian man, but his motive was unknown; he killed himself as he fled the scene. The judges had been involved in cracking down on regime opponents since the 1980s.

Saudi Arabia announced plans to enrich and sell uranium.

Africa

Mozambique opposition asks help from EU and UN in response to repression by the ruling president/

Sudan might fracture.

Asia-Pacific

China has built far more hardened aircraft shelters in the Western Pacific region than has the US over the past decade or so.

This article discusses how China’s expansion and clashes with the Philippines in the South China Sea have evolved historically, and how they are now coming "to a boil."

United States

Trump’s inauguration will be happening roughly around when this newsletter goes out, and the transfer of power seems to be proceeding smoothly. His initial actions—and executive orders—will set the tone for his administration.

Former Vice-President Mike Pence made a surprise visit to Taipei and warned that a reduction in US support for Taiwan could spark a nuclear arms race in the Asia-Pacific, as other US allies in the region would fear that they too could be abandoned by the United States.

Trump's nominee for Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, also claimed that China will invade Taiwan by 2030. Rubio was previously the ranking member on the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

China, meanwhile, has announced that it will resume group tours to Taiwan "in the near future", to "promote the interests and wellbeing" of people on both sides of the strait.

Biorisk

On the H5N1 front, an outbreak of bird flu on a factory farm in Georgia has forced officials to halt the sale of poultry in the state—a quarantine has been set up around the site, which houses 45,000 chickens, and depopulation operations are taking place.

The US CDC has urged hospitals to test whether people hospitalized with the flu have H5N1 infections.

The US is providing Moderna $590M to speed up an mRNA vaccine for bird flu.

Raw pet food has been linked to infections of and deaths from H5N1 in a number of cats.

Chinese Wuhan bat virus researcher continues with potentially dangerous research.

Sierra Leone declared a public health emergency over mpox after two new cases. Africa overall had over 212 disease outbreaks in 2024.

Tech

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced plans to make Britain an "AI superpower", and endorsed an AI Action Plan authored by Matt Clifford which includes creating AI Growth Zones that will allow companies to bypass planning rules to allow data centres and other infrastructure to be built and connected to the grid faster. Starmer suggested that too much emphasis had been placed on existential risks arising from AI, and not enough emphasis on the upsides, and that “we must move fast and take action to win the global race.” Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis welcomed the plan and agreed to serve as an adviser. The plan has only one mention of the risks of the technology: “Government must protect UK citizens from the most significant risks presented by AI and foster public trust in the technology, particularly considering the interests of marginalised groups.”

The world's largest drone manufacturer, DJI, a Chinese company, ended geofencing around restricted US locations.

TMSC confirmed it started manufacturing 4nm chips in one of its fabs in Phoenix, Arizona, at the end of 2024. These are used in smartphones and other electronics.

Outgoing president Biden has passed an executive order to lease federal sites to host AI data centers and power facilities:

The order calls for leasing federal sites owned by Defense and Energy departments to host gigawatt-scale AI data centers and new clean power facilities - to address enormous power needs on a short time frame.

Biden said the order will "accelerate the speed at which we build the next generation of AI infrastructure here in America, in a way that enhances economic competitiveness, national security, AI safety, and clean energy."

The US said it would further restrict AI chip and technology exports.

Nvidia’s biggest customers are delaying orders of their latest Blackwell chips over overheating issues with the chips.

OpenAI has urged the US to prioritize funding and supportive regulation to stay ahead of China, in their economic blueprint.

OpenAI has finalized its o3-mini model. They say it runs much faster than o1-pro, though it does not perform as well. OpenAI has also rolled out assistant-like “Tasks”: “Tasks will enable ChatGPT users to request tasks to be performed at a future time, including one-time reminders such as concert ticket sales or recurring actions like weekly news briefings or daily weather updates.” They’ve also added a new member to their board, Adebayo Ogunlesi, a private equities investor.

OpenAI employees have been “vagueposting” on Twitter (1, 2, 3, 4). Jeff Clune, a senior research adviser to DeepMind, wrote that “There's a good (and increasing) chance that FOOM is around the corner.”

Gwern, writing on LessWrong, wrote the following about the recent vagueposting:

If you're wondering why OAers are suddenly weirdly, almost euphorically, optimistic on Twitter, watching the improvement from the original 4o model to o3 (and wherever it is now!) may be why. It's like watching the AlphaGo Elo curves: it just keeps going up... and up... and up...

There may be a sense that they've 'broken out', and have finally crossed the last threshold of criticality, from merely cutting-edge AI work which everyone else will replicate in a few years, to takeoff - cracked intelligence to the point of being recursively self-improving and where o4 or o5 will be able to automate AI R&D and finish off the rest

Sam Altman tweeted in the opposite direction: “twitter hype is out of control again. we are not gonna deploy AGI next month, nor have we built it. we have some very cool stuff for you but pls chill and cut your expectations 100x!”.

Forecasters are sceptical that there is a “good chance” that FOOM is around the corner: in aggregate, they believe there’s a 50% chance (range: 40%-55%) that an OpenAI model will reach 50% on FrontierMath by the end of 2025, a 1 in 6 chance (range: 15%-20%) that 75% will be reached, and a 4% chance (range: 3%-5%) that 90% will be reached.

Microsoft revealed some details of how an unknown group bypassed their Azure AI API guardrails and created a hacking as a service scheme.

The US Supreme Court upheld a law that requires TikTok to be sold or banned. TikTok shut itself down for half a day, but came back after Trump promised to reinstate it, plus no liability for those who helped it: “I will issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security. The order will also confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order”. Forecasters are unsure (63%; range from 40% to 80%) about whether TikTok will be accessible to existing users by the end of 2025.

US added a Chinese company which develops open source LLMs to the entities list, “because these entities advance the People’s Republic of China’s military modernization through the development and integration of advanced artificial intelligence research”.

Climate

An article in the Financial Times imagines what AMOC (Atlantic meridional overturning circulation) collapse might look like for London—in short, cold.