About World Tension Meter
an open observatory · engine v4.4.2World Tension Meter is an independent, free observatory of geopolitical risk. Our own engine reads the world’s news, public attention and open market prices, and turns them into numbers you can act on: twelve indexes, 197 country scores, a living conflict roster and the first daily numeric AI Risk Index — every 10 minutes, with an open method and a record that is never revised.
The question we answer. How tense is the world right now, and what does that mean for prices, deliveries and money? Wars, sanctions, energy shocks and trade fights are the strongest drivers of inflation, and the information about them is scattered across hundreds of sources. We compress it into plain numbers with a one-line meaning each.
Our own engine. Every score is computed by our own signal engine from free public sources: a corpus of 41 public news feeds read twice a day, public attention data with a multi-year baseline, and open market prices refreshed every 10 minutes. No third-party index sits inside any number, so no provider can switch it off. The method is public, the data is free, the record is append-only.
Who runs it. An independent founder team, self-funded. No advertisers, sponsors, investors or paying customers. Read the independence & funding statement and the organization page.
What we publish
Twelve daily indexes. World Tension, Food Security, Currency Stress, Shipping Stress, Sanctions Pressure, Energy Security, Gold & Silver Fear, Crypto Fear & Greed, AI Risk, and three derived from them: Inflation Pressure, Supply Chain Risk and Market Fear. Same 0–100 scale, same five zones, each with a month-by-month timeline and a plain-English meaning.
197 countries on one map. Every country has a permanent page with its own tension score, its news pulse (every headline that names it, rolling 30 days), month-by-month history and a written long view. The country map recolours every 10 minutes.
The AI Risk Index. The first daily 0–100 measure of the risk that AI causes serious harm or acts beyond human control, with seven sub-indexes, a permanent AI incident record, a versioned methodology and an embeddable badge.
Conflicts, regions, watchlist, news. A conflict roster with a fixed lifecycle (escalating, active, cooling, dormant, retired), six regional scores, an escalation watchlist, and News Pulse — the headlines the engine read, ranked by the tension weight it gave them.
The record. A permanent archive of every daily score since 23 March 2026, locked monthly stories for every index, backtesting against real outcomes, and analysis written from the data.
Open data. An open API (JSON and CSV, no key), a data portal, llms.txt for AI assistants, and a whitepaper. Everything is free under CC BY 4.0 with attribution.
How it works, in one breath
Read. Twice a day the engine reads every headline in its corpus and scores it for tension, tags it with the countries and conflicts it names, and sorts AI stories by kind of risk.
Measure. Coverage shares are ranked against our own history, blended with attention and market signals, and combined with fixed, published weights. A capped shock overlay catches sudden events; fear physics lets scores rise fast and fall slowly, the way fear does.
Publish. Every 10 minutes the pages, the map, the badges and the API refresh. Every night the month stories, timelines and datasets are rebuilt. Nothing is edited by hand; nothing is revised after the fact. The exact formulas are on the methodology page.
Why you can trust it
Open method. Every weight is public. Open data. Everything downloadable. Open status. Engine health is public at all times on the status page. Versioned. Changes ship only as dated releases in the changelog, and the live engine version is printed on every page. Honest about estimates. Any estimated field is flagged wherever it appears. Honest about search. New pages are released to search engines only once they hold real data.
Get in touch
Corrections, research collaborations, data questions: [email protected]. Security researchers: see security.txt.
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