Sentinel minutes for week #9/2025—Trump Zelensky clash, very unlikely federal default, new AI models.
Status: Greenish 🟢
Top items:
Donald Trump supported NATO’s Article 5 mechanism in a meeting with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer when asked, but was non-committal about security guarantees to Ukraine.
Trump and his Vice-President clashed with Ukrainian President Zelensky in the Oval Office the next day, accusing him of “gambling with World War Three”.
AI safety researchers published a paper on “emergent misalignment”
China’s defence ministry warned Taiwan that “we will come and get you, sooner or later”
Geopolitics and economics
Europe
US President Donald Trump, when asked about NATO’s Article 5, answered “I support it”, and implied that the US would always back Britain in any conflict, in a cordial meeting with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, though he was non-committal about the US providing a ‘backstop’ for any European peacekeeping troops in Ukraine. He also suggested that the US might try to help Ukraine regain some territory on the Ukrainian coastline, and claimed to have forgotten that he called Ukrainian President Zelensky a “dictator”.
However, Trump and US Vice-President JD Vance clashed with Zelensky in the Oval Office after Zelensky questioned whether Russia’s President Vladimir Putin would adhere to a negotiated ceasefire. Trump accused Zelensky of “gambling with World War Three”, and some reports suggest that the US may now halt military aid to Ukraine.
Zelensky and European leaders met in London to discuss how to end the war while providing Ukraine with security guarantees.
The US voted no, with Russia and North Korea, on a UN resolution written by Ukraine and European countries that urged an end to the war in Ukraine and condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The UN General Assembly did not approve a US-backed version of the resolution that did not condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
France is considering extending its nuclear shield to other parts of Europe, potentially by posting jet fighters armed with nuclear weapons to Germany.
Having digested this news, our forecasters believe that there’s a 52% chance (range: 33% to 65%) that the Russia-Ukraine war ends before the start of 2026 (a temporary ceasefire wouldn’t count). On the prospect of “World War Three” and in light of explicit suggestions that Britain and France might send peacekeeping troops to Ukraine, our forecasters think there’s a 5% chance (range: 2% to 15%) that there will be a conflict with Russia and Britain and/or France that results in at least 10 military fatalities by the end of 2025. Note that 10 military fatalities might not result in greater conflict, for instance as in the 2020-2022 China-India skirmishes.
As the war continues, Meduza and Mediazona have provided some estimates of Russia’s death toll, with a defector leaking a database of Russian hospitalization records.
The Americas
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has reportedly ordered US Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive cyber actions.
The White House attributed a large bruise spotted on Trump’s hand to the President “shaking hands all day every day”. Others suggested that it might be because Trump is on blood thinners or had an intravenous catheter inserted.
Donald Trump announced that proposed tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico would come into effect on March 4, and said that additional tariffs on Chinese imports would be forthcoming.
In 1929, the US treasury switched from setting the interest in its bonds itself to selling them to the highest bidder, allowing the market to set the interest rate which the bonds pay. Right now the market is only bidding yearly interest on a 10Y treasury note to 4.2%, down from 4.8% just before Trump’s term started, but much higher than the 2-3% during Trump’s first term or Obama’s second. This rate is important because it’s the rate at which US government debt renews. With US debt at 120% of GDP, and the federal budget at ~23% of GDP, an interest rate of 4.2% takes 120% * 4.2% = ~5% of US GDP, or 5%/23% = ~22% of the federal budget to repay.
Growth would make that debt easier to pay, but the Atlanta Fed’s GDP Nowcast currently projects that the US economy will contract by around –2.8% in Q1 of 2025. A month ago, it had predicted 3.9% growth for the same period. A recent survey also estimates that consumer confidence in America went down.
House Republicans voted on a new budget that makes previous tax cuts permanent and adds $2T in new tax cuts (for a total of $4.5T over the coming decade), while cutting some spending on Medicaid and food stamps. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an NGO, suggests that the budget would, on its own, increase the budget deficit. A new budget or continuing resolution will need to be passed to avert a government shutdown after current funding ends on March 14.
Despite debt ceiling battles, DOGE’s activities in the Treasury and concerns about Treasury yields in the US, our forecasters believe that there’s a very low chance (~1%, range 0.5% to 5%) that the US defaults on Treasury securities in 2025. Historically, there was a technical glitch in 1979 that probably didn’t amount to a “default”, and the US did miss some interest payments during the War of 1812. If this did happen, it could have catastrophic consequences for the global economy.
In other news, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to process funding for certain USAID work by the night of February 26. The administration had so far defied the judge's order made on February 13. Late on February 26, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts paused the judge's order.
> "The Executive Branch takes seriously its constitutional duty to comply with the orders of Article III courts," she wrote.
> But she warned that the district court's deadline "makes full compliance impossible," in part because restarting funding related to canceled or suspended agreements requires multiple steps, multiple agencies and documentary evidence.
> The acting solicitor general requested an administrative stay, which would maintain the status quo, "to ensure that the agencies are not placed in the position of violating a federal court order requiring payments on thousands of requests within a 30-some-hour deadline, despite their efforts, while this court reviews the merits of their challenge."
> Justice Department lawyers said in a separate filing that they estimated the payments covered by Ali's order approached $2 billion, and for the challengers alone, the amount at issue was at least $250 million.
> "This new order requiring payment of enormous sums in less than 36 hours intrudes deeply into the prerogatives of the Executive Branch and the president's obligation under Article II to take care that the laws are faithfully executed," they wrote in a filing to the D.C. Circuit.
Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), which oversees the National Institute of Health (NIH), as well as the NIH’s acting director, directed NIH officials to ignore court orders—and the advice of the NIH's own lawyers not to ignore those orders.
The Administration’s aid freeze caused the Famine Early Warning System (FEWS.net), a gold-standard famine monitoring system which we at Sentinel looked up to, to shut down.
Asia-Pacific
A spokesperson for China’s defence ministry warned Taiwan that “we will come and get you, sooner or later” after Taiwan announced an expansion of military exercises. China also warned the US that supporting Taiwanese independence would “backfire”.
Taiwan detained a China-linked cargo ship after an undersea cable in the Taiwan Strait was severed. Multiple undersea cables in the area may have been savotaged, and a report from MEMRI puts together how different undersea cable cuts may related to China’s geopolitical aims, calling it a “salami-slicing strategy”, referring to a tactic where an aggressor achieves its objectives through a series of small, incremental actions taken individually thereby avoiding crossing any red lines and provoking a significant response. Collectively, however, these actions result in a strategic advantage.
North Korea tested cruise missiles to demonstrate nuclear deterrence. They also recently tightened ideological controls on nuclear researchers, following the execution of several key scientists working on nuclear power plant construction.
Middle East
The IAEA reported that Iran's stocks of uranium enriched to 60% purity have risen "by half" since the country began to accelerate enrichment in December. Iran is also in talks with Russia to build more nuclear power plants.
Israeli PM Netanyahu said that IDF forces would remain indefinitely in Syrian regions Israel seized after the collapse of the Assad regime, and he demanded that southern Syria be completely demilitarized. He said that Israel would not allow any Syrian forces "to enter the area south of Damascus," and that, "we will not tolerate any threat to the Druze community in southern Syria."
Tech
UK Government ministers delayed plans to regulate artificial intelligence, as they seek to align the country with US tech firms and the Trump administration. They previously intended to publish a bill within months of entering office that would have required companies to let the UK’s AI Security (formerly Safety) Institute test frontier models before their deployment.
Anthropic released its latest model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, along with Claude Code. The company called 3.7 Sonnet “our most intelligent model to date and the first hybrid reasoning model on the market.” It sets a new state of the art on software engineering.
OpenAI released its latest model, GPT-4.5, in a research preview, but warned that it might not be as capable as o1 or o3-mini. They do, however, say that it’s “our largest and best model for chat yet”. It generally doesn’t perform as well as current state of the art reasoning models, and is significantly more expensive to run. It’s currently only being offered to users on the $200/mo ChatGPT Pro subscription tier. However, GPT-4.5 will be able to be used to build much more powerful reasoning models.
AI safety expert and top forecaster Eli Lifland wrote that GPT-4.5 caused him to lengthen his AI timelines: “And now I lengthen my timelines, at least if my preliminary assessment of GPT-4.5 holds up. Not that much better than 4o (especially at coding, and worse than Sonnet at coding) while being 15x more expensive than 4o, and 10-25x more expensive than Sonnet 3.7. Weird.”
On the other hand, one forecaster noted that GPT-4.5 may have been on the shelf for at least a year: its knowledge cutoff appears to be October 2023; if so, its performance might be roughly in line with what we’d expect from a model trained then.
AI safety researchers published a paper on ‘emergent misalignment’. They finetuned GPT-4o on a narrow task of writing insecure code without warning the user, and this increased the probability that the model gave misaligned answers (including anti-human answers) to a broad range of neutral, open-ended questions that were unrelated to code. Some AI alignment researchers, such as Eliezer Yudkowsky, called this a “little sign of hope” because it might suggest that models have a “central good-evil discriminator”, although others suggested that the results have more to do with whether the model perceives that it ought to provide results that are “good” for the user or not.
Grok 3 is not well-aligned, with one user being shocked that “Grok is giving me hundreds of pages of detailed instructions on how to make chemical weapons of mass destruction”. One group is arguing that it represents an "international security concern." Its system prompt was also temporarily set to ignore all requests for “sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation”
DeepSeek is likely to release a next-generation R2 model before May, sources say. They’re also claiming a cost-profit ratio of 545% per day with its V3 and R1 models. Chinese authorities instructed China’s top AI leaders to avoid travel to the United States, amid security concerns.
Anthropic is raising $3.5 billion in a funding round that would value the company at $61.5 billion.
Microsoft is urging Trump to ease Biden’s last AI-chip export restrictions, saying they should not be applied to US allies. They also are apparently slowing down their data center leases, released a couple of small open source models, and its workers protested the sale of AI and cloud services to the Israeli military.
Meta is in talks to raise $35 billion for data centers. They are also reportedly in talks for a $200 billion data center campus project, though Meta denied this.
Two dozen people have been arrested for AI-generated CSAM in an international operation.
Biorisk
An unidentified pathogen has caused 419 reported cases and killed 53 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The first known cases, in January, were three children who developed hemorrhagic fever symptoms and died within 48 hours after eating a bat. Samples from 13 patients were tested and found to be negative for Ebola and other common hemorrhagic fever viruses, including Marburg.
One unvaccinated child died from measles and over 160 people have been infected in a growing outbreak in multiple states in the US.
The US FDA cancelled an upcoming meeting of a vaccine advisory board that was due to select virus strains for the next season’s flu vaccine.
In the US, Musk claimed that DOGE briefly ended Ebola virus disease prevention programs but then brought them back. Others say the programs have not been brought back.
The WHO says that Mpox is still a health emergency.
A £5.25 million donation establishes an engineered pandemic risk management program at Cambridge.
Climate change and natural disasters
Not only is the world not meeting greenhouse gas emission reduction targets that would be needed for the world to meet 2050 targets, but emissions are still increasing.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) met in China last week (February 24-28) to discuss its upcoming seventh assessment report. The Trump administration prevented the US delegation from attending.
NASA revised the chance that asteroid 2024 YR4 will hit the earth in 2032 to 0.004%. The asteroid is no longer considered a concern.