🟢 Thailand v. Cambodia clashes erupted and resolved, White House AI Action Plan released, Anthropic faces billion-dollar lawsuit | Global Risks Weekly Roundup #30/2025
Thailand and Cambodia exchanged fire, and Thailand sent some F-16s into Cambodia, but a ceasefire has already been reached...
Executive summary
Key items this week are:
Geopolitical risks: Thailand and Cambodia exchanged fire, and Thailand sent some F-16s into Cambodia, but a ceasefire has already been reached. Israel is being accused of causing mass starvation in Gaza by the WHO and others. Zelensky faced his first large-scale domestic protests over a law weakening the independence of anti-corruption bodies.
Economy and trade: The US and the EU reached a trade deal that would tariff EU goods coming into America at 15%. A similar agreement was reached between the US and Japan, which will now also face 15% tariffs on its goods exported to the US.
Biorisks: A paper reports a method for genetically editing mosquitoes to make them resistant to malaria in a way that can be transmitted to subsequent generations, and a method for driving such mutations into mosquito populations. H5N1 continues to pose an ongoing risk.
AI: The White House published an extensive AI Action Plan, which seeks to accelerate investment and buildout and espouses a framework of a race against China, while also recognizing some potential dangers from AI and including some recommendations for research on controllability and safety. Anthropic is embroiled in a new trial over pirating IP; forecasters assign a 68% chance that the case will reach a jury trial, and a 56% chance that $1.5B damages will be awarded conditional on losing a trial, but only a 1.1% chance that Anthropic will be out of business by the end of 2026 as a result of the trial.
Gray swans: None detected this week.
Our status is at green, representing that we aren’t seeing signals of incoming catastrophic risks over the short-term.
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Geopolitics
Asia
Thailand and Cambodia
Thailand and Cambodia exchanged fire over a decades-long border dispute, in the worst clashes between the two countries since 2011. At least one Thai F-16 fighter jet targeted Cambodian military installations; Cambodia views Thailand’s actions as “reckless and brutal military aggression”. The current military escalation was precipitated by an incident in which a Thai soldier was injured by a landmine near a disputed border area, further straining relations. Deadly clashes between Thai and Cambodian forces have killed more than 32 people, including civilians, and displaced nearly 200,000 people since July 24.
As with any new conflict, there was a chance of escalation; the US has a closer relationship with Thailand, while China and Vietnam have closer relationships with Cambodia, so the very worst-case scenario would have been that the clashes developed into a proxy conflict and then escalated globally. Instead, following pressure from Trump for a ceasefire, both countries agreed to talks and then to an “immediate ceasefire” earlier today.
Rumors are circulating that the US may be pushing to establish a military base within Thailand’s Phang Nga Naval base, as part of tariff negotiations. Thailand currently faces a 36% US tariff rate, despite a range of efforts and an LNG purchase agreement. Thai officials have denied the rumors. If the US were to receive basing rights and to place cruise missiles in Thailand, several major cities in China would be within striking range. China provides support for the much weaker Cambodia.
China and Taiwan
Taiwanese citizens rejected an attempt to oust 24 lawmakers from the relatively China-friendly opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT). Taiwan’s constitution allows for such recall elections to occur. If the lawmakers had been ousted, it could have eased the passage of legislation being pushed by President Lai, including the defense budget, because the ruling Democratic People’s Party (DPP) does not have a majority in the Legislative Yuan. The KMT have also helped pass legislation that diminishes the power of the executive, which the DPP says helps China. However, the attempt to oust the lawmakers could potentially have provoked a response from China, such as an intensification of military exercises around the islands. The electoral result will likely soothe Chinese concerns about domestic Taiwanese politics, which in turn slightly lowers the risk of an invasion before the next Presidential election in 2028. Analysts at Eurasia Group had given the chance of ousting at least 12 KMT lawmakers, which would be enough to gain temporary control of parliament, a 60% probability of succeeding.
China began construction on the world’s largest hydropower dam, in Tibet. The dam will dwarf the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. India and Bangladesh have expressed concern that the dam could affect water supplies for millions of people downstream in their countries.
China prevented a US government employee from leaving China. The employee had traveled there on a personal trip, not on US government business.
Singapore
A cyberattack targeted Singapore’s critical infrastructure. A Singapore minister blamed the espionage group UNC3886, which Mandiant has linked to China. The Chinese Embassy in Singapore said that claims that the group is linked to China are "groundless smears and accusations".
Europe
Zelensky faced his first large-scale domestic protests since the Russian invasion. He is now backtracking on a law that he signed that weakened the authority of two anti-corruption bodies, which would have placed more power in the presidency.
Ukraine and Russia are set to engage in another round of peace talks in Istanbul this week; however, Putin has ruled out meeting with Zelensky personally until a draft agreement is in place. On Tuesday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that Russia did not expect a “miraculous breakthrough” from the talks and that, “We intend to pursue our interests, we intend to ensure our interests and fulfil the tasks that we set for ourselves from the very beginning”; a statement by the Kremlin on Friday described the two sides’ positions as “diametrically opposed”. This does not bode well for talks. Meanwhile, Russia captured 214 square miles, or approximately 0.1% of Ukrainian territory, in June.
Russia has been increasing the numbers of drones attacking Ukraine at night, with a record of over 700 launched on July 9, and up to 1,000 per night expected soon. A German major general has warned that Russia may be able to launch up to 2,000 drones in a single attack within a few months. Drones offer a relatively cheap way for Russia to advance its military goals as the war’s costs increasingly strain the Russian economy.
Nearly 300 Ukrainian drones targeted St. Petersburg on Sunday, which was Navy Day in Russia. On Navy Day, Russia usually holds a large, televised parade that is attended by Putin, but the parade was canceled this year because of security concerns. Nonetheless, Putin commemorated the day in the city, monitoring Russian naval drills.
Spain participated in a Latvian NATO exercise. Russia launched a major military exercise in the Baltic Sea, and Belarus threatened to shift its Zapad-2025 joint military drills with Russia closer to Belarus’ border with NATO.
A new survey shows that “two-thirds of Romanians are nostalgic for former Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu”. Recently elected President Nicuşor Dan said that, “Corruption, a lack of transparency, promises that aren’t respected, and a (general) feeling of injustice have weakened people’s trust in the present and future.”
As a new online safety act in the UK came into effect, more users are using VPNs, which are software that masks a user’s location. “Proton VPN leapfrogged ChatGPT to become the top free app in the UK, according to Apple’s daily App Store charts, with similar services from developers Super Unlimited and Nord Security also rising over the weekend.” For now, UK residents can buy access to VPNs (e.g., Mullvad) through the normal financial system, but one forecaster recommends getting a few hundred or a thousand dollars in Monero, a privacy-preserving cryptocurrency that would allow users to purchase such tools beyond the prying eyes of the UK government, through peer-to-peer transactions (i.e., not through an exchange).
Russian has moved signal jammers near Estonia, and they are causing GPS interference in eastern Estonia. Russia also frequently jams signals near Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg.
Meta said that the company will no longer host political, election and social-issue ads in the EU starting October 10 because of legal uncertainties around EU disinformation rules.
United States
The State Department fired its experts on the South China Sea, at a time of rising tensions in the region.
The US House of Representatives adjourned early to shield Trump from the Epstein investigation. Speaker Mike Johnson said that, “he wants to give the White House “space” to release the Epstein information on its own, despite the bipartisan push for legislation that aims to force the release of more documents.”
A Human Rights Watch report alleges that immigrants in a Miami detention center were made to eat food from styrofoam plates on the ground “like dogs,” on their knees with their hands tied behind their backs, among other concerns.
A federal district judge found the Trump administration’s attempt to end birthright citizenship for children of immigrants in the US illegally to be unconstitutional, and left a nationwide injunction in effect, arguing that there was no “workable, narrower alternative”. This may be somewhat in tension with a previous Supreme Court ruling that such injunctions by lower federal courts are themselves unconstitutional.
Reuters reported that Musk ordered access to Starlink to be shut down at the Ukrainian front lines during a Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2022. Some government officials wonder whether Musk and SpaceX now have too much power.
Columbia University agreed to pay $221M in settlements to the federal government and to implement a limited set of changes requested by the Trump administration. The settlements allow federal funding to Columbia University to resume – and set a precedent that other universities are watching closely.
Trump signed an executive order that urged states to remove homeless people from the streets and encouraged states to place homeless people in mental-health or drug-treatment institutions without their consent.
Africa
In Mozambique, opposition leader Venancio Mondlane faces terrorism charges related to post-election unrest. At least 1,000 people were killed in ethnic fighting in South Sudan in one day.
Cholera and other epidemics are “side effects” of endless war in Sudan.
Middle East
Iran
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said that he is not very optimistic about the durability of the ceasefire between Israel and Iran, adding that Iran is prepared for another Israeli military attack and that Iran will not halt its nuclear enrichment activities. A spokesperson for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization said that the country’s nuclear program will recover after the recent US and Israeli strikes, and Trump warned that the US could strike Iran's nuclear sites again “if necessary”. Iran suspects that Israeli sabotage is behind a string of fires.
The Washington Post reports that Iran’s nuclear program has been set back substantially, to the point that it is “no longer a nuclear threshold state,” according to one Israeli source. The first tier, second tier, and most of the third tier of Iran’s physicists and nuclear scientists were killed, and labs and testing equipment were largely destroyed. Institutional memory was lost, and recruiting new scientists to what may be a suicide job will be challenging. However, this reporting relied on sources within the US and Israeli military and intelligence communities that could release misleading information to promote national objectives; on the ground verification is not currently possible.
Gaza
Israel is being accused of causing mass starvation in Gaza by the WHO and others. At least ten people reportedly “died of malnutrition” one day last week. A USAID study found no evidence of large-scale theft of humanitarian aid by Hamas in Gaza. French President Macron announced that France will recognize the State of Palestine.
While a ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel has been tantalizingly close for weeks, fundamental disagreements around several sticking points remain. Trump appears to have given up on ceasefire negotiations, at least for the time being, following dissatisfaction with Hamas’ demands, and Netanyahu is now exploring other options for bringing the remaining Israeli hostages home.
Syria
Syria evacuated Bedouins from the Druze-majority city of Sweida and continued talks with Israel about security developments in the city. The US conducted a raid near Aleppo that killed senior ISIS leader Dhiya’ Zawba Muslih al-Hardani and his two adult sons. A US citizen, Hosam Saraya, who was a member of the Druze religious minority, was executed in Syria in sectarian violence against the Druze. The country announced that it will hold its first parliamentary elections since Assad's fall, in September.
Afghanistan
The UN expressed concern about the Taliban’s arrests of women and girls in Kabul, Afghanistan between July 16 and July 19 for alleged dress code violations. In 2022, the Taliban decreed that women are only allowed to show their eyes in public and that wearing a head-to-toe burqa is recommended.
Economy
The US and the EU have reached a trade deal. The US will impose a 15% tariff on most goods imported from the EU, half the 30% rate that had been threatened; this rate will also be applied to cars, pharmaceuticals and semiconductors, which could have faced even higher rates. The deal includes $600B in investments by the EU in the US and substantially greater EU purchases of US energy and military equipment. US tariff rates of 50% on steel and aluminum will stay in place for now; other details remain to be discussed. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen remarked of the agreement that, “It will bring stability. It will bring predictability,” which is what markets like. Almost a third of global trade is between the US and the EU.
The US and Japan also reached a trade agreement: the US will also impose a 15% tariff on goods from Japan, lower than the previously threatened rate of 25%. Japan will allow US cars and rice to be imported, and Japanese cars will not face US import quotas.
US Treasury Secretary Bessent called for “the entire Federal Reserve institution” to be examined, a statement that would likely appeal to Trump, who has expressed displeasure with the Fed chair.
Some Wall Street analysts are warning that the US stock market is in bubble territory.
AI and Technology
The White House published an extensive AI Action Plan, with the goal of facilitating AI development and adoption in the US. A White House news article about the executive order stated that, “Winning the AI race will usher in a new golden age of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people.” The plan is very optimistic about the future with AI, is broadly accelerationist, advocates against “onerous regulation” and encourages the release of open-source and open-weight models. The plan also includes measures to promote the rapid construction of data centres, expand the capacity of the electric grid and strengthen supply chains. However, the plan does recognize some potential risks from AI and includes some recommendations for research on controllability and safety.
The US AI Action Plan also updates “Federal procurement guidelines to ensure that the government only contracts with frontier large language model developers who ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias” - i.e., whose models aren’t “woke.”
China has said it wants to start a new global AI cooperation organization.
Even though US export-control laws do not allow Nvidia’s advanced AI chips to be shipped to China, they’re getting there anyway. More than $1B of Nvidia advanced AI chips were shipped to China over the past 3 months. “‘Export controls will not prevent the most advanced Nvidia products from entering China,’ said one Chinese data centre operator. ‘What it creates is just inefficiency and huge profits for the risk-taking middle men.’”
A new study has found that language models fine-tuned from the same base model can learn from each other via hidden signals that are transmitted in what appear to be innocuous, unrelated data. The teacher model is fine-tuned to have some desired characteristics: loving owls, or being generally misaligned. The student model is then fine-tuned on correct outputs from the teacher model that have nothing to do with the teacher model’s added characteristics. But somehow, the student model picks up these characteristics. For example, one student model produced responses saying it wanted to end humanity, after being trained only on correct math reasoning traces from the teacher model, picking up this fine-tuned characteristic.
Keren Gu of OpenAI said that ChatGPT Agent is “the first model we’ve classified as High capability in biology & chemistry under our Preparedness Framework.”
It’s rumored that GPT-5 is coming in August. Sam Altman said on a podcast that GPT-5 is smarter than humans at almost everything and gave an example where he said it made him feel useless. Forecasters give it a 62% chance (range 40% to 75%) that GPT-5 will be released by the end of August. Forecasters are skeptical of statements from Altman, but competition will increase pressure on OpenAI.
At a Federal Reserve meeting, Sam Altman said that some entire job categories would disappear because of AI. He also said that he felt OpenAI wasn’t being listened to about the potential for AI-enabled biothreats, but that that was a “big thing coming”. OpenAI and Oracle announced an agreement to develop an additional 4.5 GW of Stargate datacenter capacity in the US. But OpenAI is also having difficulty finding financing for the $500B plan it announced earlier this year.
A leaked Anthropic memo revealed that Dario Amodei is pursuing Gulf State investments after all. Garrison Lovely writes that Anthropic is facing a “potentially business-ending” copyright lawsuit. Damages from its use of pirated books could run into the billions of dollars.
Lovely notes that judges don’t tend to impose damages that bankrupt major companies; if the case is not settled out of court, damages in the ballpark of $1.5B after jury trial, or perhaps less after appeal, might be more likely. Forecasters think there’s a 68% chance (range 60% to 75%) that Anthropic will go through with a jury trial rather than settle out of court. Forecasters also think that if Anthropic loses, total damages awarded will probably to be at least $1.5B (56%; range: 20% to 80%, although, see this unconditional Manifold question at 17%); damages of at least $10B (12% chance, range 5% to 25%) or $100B (1.2% chance, range 0.5% to 5%) are possible but much less likely. Forecasters give it a 1.1% chance (range 0.5% to 3%) that if Anthropic loses, the damages will put it out of business by the end of 2026.
Forecasters bring up that the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement in 1998 was ~$206B, which is equivalent to about $403B today. This agreement settled a multi-state case regarding healthcare costs associated with smoking and the involved companies’ egregious behavior, clear knowledge and culpability. It provides a historical example of an extremely large legal penalty. Anthropic’s case does not involve any deaths, so the damages they face will undoubtedly be lower. In a case with some similarities to Anthropic’s, a jury awarded $1B in penalties against Cox Communications in 2019; the case is still being litigated in higher courts.
Also: Musk wrote on X that, “The @xAI goal is 50 million in units of H100 equivalent-AI compute (but much better power-efficiency) online within 5 years”. Meta has announced that Shengjia Zhao, formerly of OpenAI, will be the Chief Scientist of its new superintelligence development effort. An AI therapist encouraged a journalist to kill himself and other people, and so did ChatGPT. And, a study found that 72% of US teens have interacted with an AI “companion” at least once.
Technology
More than 50 organizations, including the US National Nuclear Security Administration, were reportedly breached in Microsoft SharePoint cyberattacks by hacking groups affiliated with the Chinese government. However, no classified information was leaked.
Starlink suffered a global outage that lasted 2.5 hours and affected at least tens of thousands of users. SpaceX reported that, “failure of key internal software services that operate the core network” caused the outage and that the problem has been resolved.
The groundwork is being laid for the development of nuclear-powered shipping. The World Nuclear Transport Institute (WNTI) and the Nuclear Energy Maritime Organisation (NEMO) have signed a memorandum of understanding about how to divide their efforts to develop standards for nuclear-powered shipping and the shipping of nuclear and radioactive materials. “WNTI will focus on the transport of nuclear materials and transportable nuclear power plants. Nemo will lead on issues related to nuclear-powered and propelled ships, including regulation, design, and operations. For floating nuclear power plants, both organisations will work side by side.” In addition, later this year, the IAEA will likely launch a programme to help countries develop regulations for and to provide guidance for the transport of small modular reactors (SMRs) and the use of nuclear energy at sea. Ocean shipping is responsible for about 2.9% of global carbon emissions.
A drone strike killed over 100 people in Ethiopia, in an early sign of the proliferation of drones and drone warfare in Africa.
Biorisks
Genetically edited mosquitoes that are highly resistant to infection with the malaria parasite but can breed normally have been made. A method for driving the mutation efficiently into a mosquito population was also developed, and this method could also be used to drive other mutations into mosquito populations as well, to combat malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases.
While H5N1 bird flu may be out of the headlines at the moment, it remains a worldwide concern. H5N1 has been reported to have infected 50% more mammalian species over the past year than it did in the previous several decades. “By March 2024, at least 48 mammal species had been reported infected by H5N1. … We found that between March 2024 and June 2025 the number of infected mammal species increased by 50%, reaching at least 72 species. In just over one year, 24 new species have been recorded as infected”. While this increase may result in part from an increasing detection rate, it also likely reflects a growing ability of the virus to infect mammals.
Over 4,000 cases of chikungunya, a mosquito-borne disease, have been reported over the past couple weeks in a growing outbreak in southern China.
Climate and Nature
Extreme weather – heat, droughts, and heavy rainfall – is causing short-term spikes in food prices around the world.
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