Sentinel minutes for week #5/2025: Trump executive orders, China building larger Pentagon, first H5N1 case detected in the UK.

Sentinel status: Greenish—no urgent costly action deemed needed from our reserve team, yet.

Top items:

• The Trump administration continues to issue executive orders drastically reshaping the US government’s activities both domestically and abroad

• The Trump administration announced large tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China. These would have sweeping economic consequences, but it’s unclear whether they will durably persist or whether Trump will use them as bargaining chips.

• Hedge funds have made massive bets that the US stock market will fall—or crash.

• China is building a military command centre ten times the size of the US Pentagon.

Geopolitics

The Americas

Trump's team continues with its haphazard application of sweeping executive orders aiming to redefine the activities of the US government at home and abroad.

An order pausing federal aid was ruled to be violating the law by a federal judge - twice. The US Agency for International Development might be eliminated. Musk's DOGE has gained access to Treasury payment systems, and acting Deputy Treasury Secretary David Lebryk resigned after Musk and his DOGE organization requested access. Musk has vowed to cancel grants after gaining access to the Treasury system. Trump has said he plans to use Guantanamo Bay as a detention facility for up to 30,000 illegal immigrants.

Trump is implementing large tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China, starting trade wars with US allies and competitors alike. Mexico and Canada have imposed retaliatory tariffs, and China will challenge Trump’s tariffs through the World Trade Organization.

The list of changes is far too long to cover here; here is an overview of the broad categories of his executive orders.

It is likely that a substantial number of these executive actions may violate existing laws, and a long stream of lawsuits is likely to result. Given the administration's actions thus far, it seems likely to at least some of our forecasters that the Trump administration's strategy may be to push through so many changes that, even if later overturned by the courts, they are able to quickly transform the US federal government.

A poll suggests that very few people in Greenland want to join the United States, with only 6% expressing support. Another poll suggests that more people in Denmark believe that the US is a threat than they do North Korea or Iran.

In January, hedge funds made massive bets that the US stock market would fall.

"Data from Goldman Sachs has sent shockwaves through financial circles, revealing a dramatic surge in 'short' positions against US stocks - a move that signals a belief the market is headed for a precipitous crash. Throughout January, investors placed 10 times more bets on American stocks falling than on their continued rise."

Nicaragua approved constitutional reforms expanding presidential powers.

Europe

Russia is closing in on the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, a key logistical hub.

Putin has refused direct talks with Zelenskyy.

North Korean troops in Ukraine have been taken off the front lines.

Norway has released an all-Russian crew ship suspected of damaging a Baltic Sea telecoms cable. Tromsø police said:

The investigation will continue, but we see no reason for the ship to remain in Tromsoe any longer. No findings have been made linking the ship to the act (of damaging the subsea cable)," the police said in a statement.

A data cable in the Baltic Sea running between Sweden and Latvia was damaged, in the latest case of potential sabotage. The Malta-flagged Vezhen ship has been seized as part of a probe into the damage. As we covered last week, it is possible that some or all of these incidents are genuine accidents. On the other hand, at least 11 Baltic cables have been damaged in the past 15 months.

Many shoppers boycotted supermarkets this week in the Balkans over rising prices.

Middle East

Israel has released 110 Palestinian prisoners, after delays over chaotic hostage handovers. Israel also announced that it would be staying in Syria’s Mount Hermon indefinitely.

Iran is developing nuclear-capable warheads, an opposition group says.

Yemen’s Houthi rebels have unilaterally released 153 war detainees, the Red Cross says.

Syria's de facto leader Ahmed al-Sharaa was declared president.

Asia

China is building a wartime military command centre in Beijing that will be the largest in the world, at ten times the size of the Pentagon. Major construction appears to have begun in mid-2024. In January, the site was unusually busy with construction activity, in contrast with most big real estate projects in China, and there is no mention of the construction site on the internet in Chinese. The site may replace China's current main secure command centre, a Cold War-era installation located in the Western Hills. The complex could help the PLA integrate its different branches; the lack of integration within the Chinese military is considered to be one of its biggest weaknesses.

Taiwan has banned government agencies from using DeepSeek. A number of US government agencies, including NASA, have done the same.

A Foreign Affairs article explores how private tech companies could help Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion.

The US Navy has been very active in the Indo-Pacific region over the past month.

India and China have agreed to resume direct commercial flights for the first time in five years.

Pakistan says Afghan-based “terrorists” are increasingly using modern weaponry left behind by the US for cross-border terrorism.

Myanmar’s ruling military junta extended the country’s state of emergency for another six months.

Japan is buying $4.5B worth of missiles this month.

Africa

Rwanda-backed M23 rebels claimed a major Congolese city, which Congo calls a “declaration of war.”

Islamic Jihadis continue to terrorize Nigerian Christians.

Biorisk

The first human H5N1 case has been detected in the UK.

Poultry farmers in the UK have urged the government to allow them to vaccinate their flocks against bird flu, which is almost the inverse of the situation in the US, where chicken farmers are generally opposed to bird flu vaccination. The UK Government's position is that quarantines and culling are the most effective way to stop the spread of bird flu, and that use of a bird flu vaccine might facilitate viral evolution. Other concerns include the possibility that vaccination will mask the presence of the disease in poultry flocks. Our forecasters lean toward thinking poultry vaccination against bird flu is a good idea; poultry vaccination has successfully controlled H7N9 in China. Many H5N1 poultry vaccines are in various stages of development and use.

An H5N9 flu virus was found in a duck at a California duck farm. H5N9 and H5N1 viruses had both been detected at the farm, and the H5N9 virus likely resulted from reassortment (genetic mixing) between them.

Five gentoo penguins and five king penguins tested positive for H5N1 bird flu on South Georgia, a sub-Antarctic island known as a rich wildlife breeding ground.

A nurse in Uganda's capital city Kampala has died of Ebola, the first fatality since the country’s last outbreak ended in early 2023. Six of his contacts have now become ill as well. The Ugandan government, with the assistance of the WHO and other organizations, is working to stop the outbreak.

The Trump administration ordered the US CDC to stop working with the WHO immediately.

The US CIA now says that COVID most likely originated from a lab leak but has “low confidence” in its assessment.

Technology

Artificial Intelligence

Alibaba released an AI model it says surpasses DeepSeek.

Sam Altman welcomed the competition from DeepSeek and said OpenAI would pull up some releases:

deepseek's r1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they're able to deliver for the price. we will obviously deliver much better models and also it's legit invigorating to have a new competitor! we will pull up some releases.

This contrasts with this 2023 blog post from Altman where he indicated that when deployments risk accelerating an unsafe AI race, OpenAI might significantly change their plans around continuous deployment.

OpenAI then proceeded to publicly deploy o3-mini, a reasoning model, on Friday. On coding, the model appears to outperform o1 on medium and high reasoning efforts, at significantly lower latency and costs. Both paid and free users have access to it.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay on China and AI. This received significant criticism for his advocacy for the use of recursive self-improvement for the US to obtain AI supremacy. Recursive self-improvement could be an incredibly dangerous process to initiate, and could result in an uncontrollable artificial superintelligence - along with the associated existential risks of that. While some of our forecasters would prefer that the US and China cooperate to slow down the pace of AI progress, allowing more time for advances in AI safety to occur, others think that developing AI in the next couple of decades is preferable to substantially slowing down progress. Amodei also called for export controls on chips to be maintained by the United States.

> If China can't get millions of chips, we'll (at least temporarily) live in a unipolar world, where only the US and its allies have these models. It's unclear whether the unipolar world will last, but there's at least the possibility that, because AI systems can eventually help make even smarter AI systems, a temporary lead could be parlayed into a durable advantage¹⁰. Thus, in this world, the US and its allies might take a commanding and long-lasting lead on the global stage.

A clip of Amodei speaking about the risks of US-China AI racing, back in 2017, also resurfaced. Nathan Labenz, commenting, wrote: The shift from a cautious, collaborative attitude wrt China not long ago to a zero-sum competitive outlook today - by both Dario and Sam - has been very disappointing - and they’ve offered no explanation for the change!

Berkeley researchers replicated a DeepSeek-R1 reasoning capability, the ability to play Countdown, for just $30 (not a typo). They found that this was not possible with a 0.5 billion parameter model, but once scaled to 1.5 billion or more, playing the game became possible. For context, GPT-4, released in March 2023, has 1.8 trillion parameters, though frontier AI models have been becoming smaller.

The US is looking into whether DeepSeek used restricted AI chips, and lawmakers are urging Trump to consider new controls on Nvidia chips used by DeepSeek. However, Berkeley’s replication of reasoning capabilities for extreme low cost casts doubt over the claim that DeepSeek necessarily used chips under export controls.

Sam Altman, writing on Reddit, writes

> i personally think a fast takeoff is more plausible than i thought a couple of years ago. probably time to write something about this...

OpenAI has signed an agreement with the US National Laboratories for its reasoning models to be used in research at the labs.

Other Technology

A drone operator has pleaded guilty to flying a drone and causing a collision with a firefighting aircraft during a recent fire in Los Angeles. He was flying a DJI drone; we reported previously that DJI drones, which are manufactured in China, are no longer geofenced.

Natural Disasters

An asteroid 40m to 100m in diameter was discovered in December and is estimated to have a 1.4% probability of 1.4% Impacting Earth on December 27, 2032. If it did hit earth, it would then have a 0.3% chance of hitting an urban area with a population over 1M.