From Geopolitical Conflict to Simulation Intelligence

In December 2021, a cluster of rooms on Harvard University's campus became the command centers of the world's great powers. Military officers, diplomats, intelligence professionals, and academics assumed the roles of senior leaders in Washington, Moscow, Beijing, and Brussels inside an immersive geopolitical simulation called Red Horizon.

Midway through the exercise, to the shock of their NATO counterparts, the team representing Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Seventy-five days later, Vladimir Putin did the same.

For many observers, that coincidence became the story. For Arvid Bell, it confirmed something much larger: history does not emerge randomly. It emerges from systems of human decisions. And if those systems can be understood well enough, they can also be simulated.

From Conflict Zones to Scientific Discovery

For most of his career, Arvid Bell has been driven by one question:

Why do intelligent leaders, surrounded by information and experienced advisers, repeatedly make decisions that lead to catastrophe?

That question took him from conflict environments across Afghanistan, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Europe to Harvard University—and ultimately to the founding of Anadyr Horizon.

Before entering academia full time, Arvid spent more than a decade supporting negotiation initiatives, investor-state mediation, and diplomatic efforts in regions shaped by conflict and strategic competition. Across vastly different environments, he encountered the same recurring problem. Information usually existed. Expertise usually existed. But leaders lacked a way to understand how thousands of interconnected political, military, economic, and institutional decisions would interact before events became irreversible.

The challenge was rarely insufficient information. It was insufficient simulation.

That realization became the foundation of Arvid’s research. Over the following years, he published peer-reviewed work introducing concepts such as cognitive maelstroms, nested negotiation networks, and cascading decision effects. Rather than treating negotiations as isolated conversations, his research described them as complex systems in which decisions continuously reshape one another across institutions, governments, and societies.

As his research program expanded, Arvid was appointed Lecturer on Government at Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Scholar-Entrepreneur at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. To test these ideas beyond the classroom, he founded the Negotiation Task Force and created Red Horizon, an immersive geopolitical simulation designed to reconstruct how governments actually function during international crises.

The simulations consistently surfaced strategic dynamics that conventional analysis overlooked. But they also exposed their own limitation. A single exercise required roughly a year of research, dozens of specialists, and nearly one hundred participants. It could explore one possible future with extraordinary depth.

Reality contained the seeds for thousands.

From War Gaming to Simulation Intelligence

The second thread in Anadyr Horizon's origin story began with William Potter.

Potter founded the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies—today the world's largest nongovernmental organization devoted to the study of weapons of mass destruction—and remains one of the world's foremost authorities on nuclear nonproliferation.

He introduced Arvid to Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, an experimental physicist whose work on the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory contributed to the Nobel Prize-winning discovery that neutrinos possess mass before he turned his attention to nuclear security, existential risk, and artificial intelligence.

As generative AI advanced, Dalnoki-Veress began experimenting with autonomous agents. What fascinated him was not the information they produced but their behavior. Under pressure, the agents negotiated, formed coalitions, adapted, concealed information, and sometimes even lied.

When Arvid saw the results of those experiments, he recognized that they had approached the same problem from opposite scientific traditions. Arvid had spent years modeling human decision-making through immersive geopolitical simulations grounded in negotiation science, political science, and cognitive-behavioral research. Dalnoki-Veress had independently begun observing remarkably similar patterns through AI simulations informed by experimental physics and complex systems research.

Arvid realized that what had once required nearly one hundred experts in a physical simulation might now be possible computationally—and at unprecedented scale.

That insight became Anadyr Horizon.

From Simulation Intelligence to Decision Infrastructure

Founded in 2024 by Arvid, Dalnoki-Veress, and Potter, the company is pioneering a new category of software it calls Simulation Intelligence (SIMINT). Its platform, North Star, constructs digital decision systems representing governments, organizations, and leaders operating under real-world constraints. Rather than forecasting a single outcome, it simulates thousands of plausible pathways, identifying recurring patterns, escalation dynamics, early warning indicators, and intervention opportunities before crises become visible.

The company's origins trace directly to years of original research into negotiation systems, complex decision-making, and immersive simulation—not simply to advances in artificial intelligence. AI made computational scale possible. But the underlying intellectual architecture had already been built. Anadyr transformed that research into Agentic Systems Intelligence (ASI), its proprietary simulation engine, which serves as the technological foundation of its Simulation Intelligence platform.

Arvid believes every technological era creates a new form of decision infrastructure. Maps transformed exploration. Satellites transformed military intelligence. Artificial intelligence transformed information processing. Simulation, he believes, will become the next foundational layer of institutional decision-making.

As this new world emerges, Anadyr Horizon is pursuing a simple but ambitious objective: to help leaders see around corners—before history makes the decision for them.