🟢 Taiwan defense rehearsals, Israel-Syria ceasefire, IMO Gold at OpenAI | Global Risks Weekly Roundup #29/2025.

Executive summary

Taiwan conducted its largest-ever defense drills to prepare for a possible Chinese invasion, while the US has been pushing Japan and Australia to clarify whether they would get involved in a US-China war over Taiwan. Forecasters estimated the probability of a Chinese invasion by 2027 conditional on Japan saying it would not intervene to be 11.5%, and 22% conditional on Trump or the Defense Secretary saying the US would not intervene.

In the Middle East, the Houthis continue to attack Israel, and Israel responded today with strikes on a Houthi-controlled port in Yemen. Israel also intervened in Syria following renewed sectarian violence between Druze and Sunni Bedouin groups, later reaching a ceasefire deal with the Syrian government.

OpenAI launched ChatGPT Agent and claimed that an experimental reasoning model achieved Gold Medal-level performance in the International Mathematical Olympiad, while teasing the release of GPT-5. Forecasters looked at timelines to “superhuman coders” and “artificial superintelligence”.

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Geopolitics

Asia-Pacific

Taiwan conducted its largest defense drills to date in preparation for a possible Chinese attack, with sirens and civilian evacuations making up part of the rehearsals. This did not materially impact forecasters’ estimates of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan but highlighted the ongoing risk. In aggregate, forecasters estimate that there is a 10.5% (range: 4% to 20%) chance that China will attempt an invasion of Taiwan before 2027, with the probability rising to 22.5% (range: 10% to 40%) if Taiwan formally declares independence before then.

Japan told its companies in Taiwan that they are on their own if China invades, meaning that the companies would have to take it upon themselves to evacuate their staff. This is a signal that Japan doesn’t want to get involved in a China-Taiwan war. If a member of the Japanese government were to publicly state that Japan would not get involved in such a war, this would slightly raise the team’s aggregate probability of an attempted Chinese invasion before 2027 to 11.5% (range: 5% to 21%), as China will be looking for signals from countries like the US (principally) and Japan that there will be little opposition to an invasion.

The US Pentagon has been pushing Japan and Australia to clarify how they would respond if the US and China were to become embroiled in a conflict over Taiwan, suggesting that the chance of a US intervention if China does attempt to take Taiwan is high. However, if the US President or Secretary of Defense were to publicly state before 2027 that the US would not get involved, this would raise the team’s probability of an attempted Chinese invasion before 2027 to 22% (range: 11% to 60%). The team still thinks it would be unlikely, because there isn’t much time before the end of 2026, China might fear that the US would change its stance, and China might seek a peaceful unification with Taiwan if the US does pledge not to intervene.

Middle East

Another leaked US intelligence assessment suggests that damage to two of Iran’s three main nuclear enrichment sites was limited and would set back work at these sites only by months. However, one of the three sites was reportedly mostly destroyed.

Israel’s Eilat Port in the south of the country is facing financial collapse in the absence of government aid because of Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea. Over 90% of activity at the port has reportedly been lost because of the ongoing disruption of trade routes.

The Houthis launched another missile towards Israel this past week, and it was intercepted. After these recent missile launches and the Houthis having sunk two ships the previous week, Israel today responded by striking the Yemeni port of Hodeida, which is under Houthi control. A week and a half ago, it was reported that Israel had asked the US to step in militarily again to protect shipping in the Red Sea.

Israel and Syria agreed to a ceasefire after fighting broke out between Druze and Sunni Muslim Bedouin tribes in Sweida, Syria. Israel backed the Druze and struck the headquarters of Syria’s Defense Ministry and a location near the presidential palace. Druze make up about 2% of Israel’s population, serve in the Israeli military and are generally supportive of the State of Israel.

Sectarian violence continues to be a problem in Syria, and the verdict is still out as to whether the government of President Sharaa of Syria can provide a balance between a degree of autonomy and protection for the various ethnic groups in his country while exerting enough control to be considered the leader of the entire country. Hope for normalization between Syria and Israel is dampened after the recent conflict, but both sides are likely to seek a stable relationship in the medium term. However, any factional group can set that back by unilaterally starting new clashes.

Israel conducted airstrikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon.

Europe

The EU and the UK increased sanctions on Russia. Forecasters do not think that this alone materially increases the probability of a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, as there have been multiple rounds of sanctions, but combined with US action at the end of Trump’s 50-day deadline, sanctions could alter Russia’s calculus.

Russia is expected to heighten its summer offensive in the coming days or weeks.

A top US general said that NATO must prepare for the possibility that China and Russia could coordinate to invade Taiwan and start a war in Europe simultaneously, as early as 2027.

The US Army and NATO allies are developing an integrated “Eastern Flank Deterrence Line,” focusing first on defense of the Baltic countries from potential Russian aggression.

US nuclear weapons have been deployed to the UK, for the first time since at least 2008.

Russia developed a deep-undercover spy ring in Brazil, from which it launched espionage operations worldwide. It has now been shut down.

United States

The Epstein turmoil continues to dog the Trump administration, having not abated after two weeks. The recent release from the Wall Street Journal of a bawdy birthday letter, allegedly from Trump to Epstein, added fuel to the story, though some Trump supporters who were disappointed with the administration for failing to release the “Epstein Files” rallied to Trump’s defence when the story came out. On balance, forecasters believe that the issue won’t substantially dent Trump’s approval rating but could harm Congressional Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections.

ICE’s acting director issued a memo declaring that immigration detainees who entered the US illegally are ineligible for bond hearings. This means that immigrants who challenge deportation proceedings in court will be held in detention for up to months or years until their immigration cases are completed.

More immigration judges are being fired or leaving voluntarily, at a time when the Trump administration is focusing on deporting more immigrants.

The US is conducting third-country deportations to Eswatini.

A federal US appeals court has ruled that the US cannot remove protected status for Afghans who helped the US government.

Defense Secretary Hegseth ordered federalized National Guard troops sent to Los Angeles because of anti-ICE protests to be withdrawn.

Africa

Gunmen killed an estimated 1,111 Nigerians and abducted 276 in June.

Technology

OpenAI launched ChatGPT Agent, an AI system that takes control of your computer to do tasks for you. ChatGPT Agent appears to be close to OpenAI’s public definition of AGI, “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work”:

On an internal benchmark designed to evaluate model performance on complex, economically valuable knowledge-work tasks, ChatGPT agent's output is comparable to or better than that of humans in roughly half the cases across a range of task completion times, while significantly outperforming o3 and o4-mini.

OpenAI also claims that an experimental reasoning model, which it will not be releasing to the public for several months, achieved Gold Medal-level performance in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), though OpenAI’s results were graded by three former IMO medalists, not by IMO personnel,, and were 1 point away from Silver. Other labs might have similar results; DeepMind is waiting a week to release its results. In 2021, AI alignment researcher Paul Christiano gave it less than an 8% chance that an AI model could achieve Gold Medal-level performance on the IMO before the end of 2025, while Eliezer Yudkowsky gave it roughly a 16% chance.

The lead researcher on the IMO project also said that GPT-5 will be released “soon”. Another researcher at OpenAI echoed this, teasing that “we’ll see” whether it upends the industry like GPT-4 did.

Meta, meanwhile, continues to ramp up its efforts to build superintelligence, reportedly using tents for extra datacenter capacity. Mark Zuckerberg also announced that the company is building a series of superclusters, with one using 5 Gigawatts of power. The first such multi-gigawatt datacenter is expected to be functional in 2026. Just one of these clusters will cover a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan.

Taking stock of these and other developments, forecasters make the following aggregate estimates for the arrival of superhuman coders (defined in the AI 2027 scenario as “an AI system that can do any coding tasks that the best AGI company engineer does, while being much faster and cheaper”):

10th percentile: 2028,

50th percentile: Mid-2032,

90th percentile: 2056.

For artificial superintelligence (defined as “an AI system that is much better than the best human at every cognitive task”), their aggregate estimates are:

10th percentile: 2030,

50th percentile: 2040,

90th percentile: >2070.

In other news, researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and other institutions jointly published a paper recommending further research into AI Chain-of-Thought monitorability, which is one of the few ways AI researchers can get insight into what an AI system is thinking. They say the method shows promise but may be fragile and at risk of being degraded.

Microsoft is likely to sign the EU’s code of practice, while Meta is refusing; OpenAI and Mistral have already signed it. The voluntary code of practice was developed to help companies comply with the EU’s AI Act and will encourage companies to publish summaries of what was used to train their models and to put policies in place to comply with EU copyright law.

The Future of Life Institute got a panel of AI experts to score AI companies on various safety metrics. They all scored pretty badly. On the crucial issue of “existential safety”,i.e., how to make sure AI doesn’t end in disaster, none scored above a D.

Nvidia will resume selling H20 AI chips to China, as part of US-China negotiations over rare earths.

Anthropic is rolling out Claude for financial services.

OpenAI and Anthropic researchers have been criticizing xAI’s “reckless” safety culture, with xAI having launched models without system cards — documentation about systems that includes information about safety and mitigations that has become standard among frontier AI companies.

Grok also now includes an AI “companion” feature, and xAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have each won US military contracts of up to $200 million.

xAI is in talks to lease data center capacity in Saudi Arabia.

Westinghouse announced that it plans to build 10 new nuclear reactors in the US and plans to start construction by 2030. Goldman Sachs predicts that global nuclear power generating capacity will grow by 200GW by 2040, from 9% to 12% of global power generation. “Data centers currently use 1% to 2% of the world’s power, which is expected to increase to 3% to 4% by 2030. They currently account for 3% of US power demand, which is expected to increase to 8% by 2030.”

A few months ago, Chinese researchers published a study reporting that they developed and tested a non-nuclear hydrogen bomb that causes extensive thermal damage over a far broader area than TNT but whose blast force is about 40% of TNT’s. If further developed it could lead to a new class of non nuclear but very destructive weapons..

Biorisk

Covid may be settling down into a pattern of two peaks per year, in late summer and winter, in the US and likely elsewhere.

The Africa CDC has recorded over 4,200 cholera and mpox deaths so far in 2025.

Economy

The Trump administration has begun a formal search for the next Federal Reserve chair. Trump briefly threatened to fire the current Fed chair, Jerome Powell, but backed down soon after. The Fed controls US monetary policy independently, and bond markets would react adversely if the president were to intervene in Fed decisions or exert control through a threat of firing the Fed chair. If Trump were to fire Powell, it would likely lead to increased borrowing costs for the US government and accelerate a shift of the world economy away from US Treasuries and the US dollar. The Deutsche Bank Head of FX Research wrote, “The empirical and academic evidence on the impact of a loss of central bank independence is fairly clear: In extreme cases, both the currency and the bond market can collapse as inflation expectations move higher, real yields drop and broader risk premia increase on the back of institutional erosion.”

Japanese bond yields again hit high levels. On Tuesday, Japanese 10-year bond yields reached their highest levels since the 2008-09 financial crisis, but fell back later in the week. Japanese 30-year bond yields also reached a new peak on Tuesday. US 30-year Treasury yields rose to over 5.00% last week as well.