Executive summary

Top items

• Geopolitics: The EU opted not to use Russian assets either directly or as collateral to fund Ukraine's defence. The US seized an oil tanker in international waters off the coast of Venezuela and pursued another; one of them was Chinese-owned. The US Congress renewed its military commitments to Ukraine, Taiwan and other allies in Europe and Asia.

• Tech and AI: METR found that Claude Opus 4.5 has the highest measured time horizon on their suite of multi-step software and reasoning tasks, at around 4 hours and 49 minutes. A former DeepMind Director of Engineering thought, very likely incorrectly, that he had solved a Millennium Prize problem with AI assistance, potentially in an example of AI psychosis/AI-catalyzed hubris.

Forecasts

This week, we forecasted on a few of the things we think may or may not happen in 2026. We’ll have more for you next week.

• Forecasters think there's a 5.7% (3% to 15%) chance that the US unemployment rate will rise above 10% at any point in 2026.

• They think there's a 44% (39% to 50%) probability that a major AI lab will hold an IPO.

• They believe [...]

---

Outline:

(00:22) Executive summary

(02:39) Geopolitics

(02:42) Europe

(03:46) The Americas

(03:48) Latin America

(06:52) United States

(07:35) More Epstein files were released by the Department of Justice following the success of a discharge petition in Congress, but they were criticised for being heavily redacted. They feature photographs and other materials related to Donald Trump, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Bill Clinton and others.

(09:24) Middle East

(10:26) Asia

(10:52) Technology and artificial intelligence

(14:03) Biorisk

---

First published:
December 22nd, 2025

Source:
https://blog.sentinel-team.org/p/ai-unemployment-and-ipos-in-2026

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.