Never heard of A/I and I have no idea what they are about, but rather than a government communication this statement reads like an angry rant with lots of unhelpful name-calling.
I would expect a government to be professional and just stick to the (proven) facts and avoiding labels; that would also be more convincing. Oh well.
This is the new Republican mainstream, the same mainstream that brings us AI generated videos of the Obamas as apes. They have no shame and are likely irredeemable (certainly their behavior is inexcusable).
And ultimately these statements aren't for the normal citizens. They're for the truly strange, the racists, and the trolls.
> The anarchist cells responsible for sabotaging rail systems across France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands in 2026, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attacks, publish official communiqués, and disseminate manuals for constructing improvised incendiary devices to target railways and other critical infrastructure.
> The anarchist cell responsible for sabotaging the Transalpine Pipeline (TAL) in March 2026, which temporarily halted crude oil flows to Austria, Germany, and the Czech Republic, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attack and publish official communiqués, as well as to disseminate a manifesto calling for additional attacks on critical infrastructure and referring adherents to another A/I Collective platform, which provides detailed sabotage manuals as well as maps of vulnerable critical infrastructure across North America.
> The far-left extremist network responsible for multiple arson attacks and acts of sabotage against Germany’s rail and energy infrastructure between 2011 and 2026, including a January 2026 attack on Berlin’s power grid that cut power to 45,000 households and resulted in a fatality, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for attacks, publish official communiques, and disseminate a manifesto calling for additional attacks on energy infrastructure worldwide.
Is the car manufacturer responsible for their use of a car? The power tools manufacturer? The paper sheet manufacturer? The restaurant that fed them?
Technical intermediaries could be held responsible specifically for hosting the manifestos (under freedom of the press laws), but that requires an actual due process. Meanwhile, 100% of the authors and websites who inspired or relayed Anders Brejvik and other neo-fascist terrorists are still online and are not facing any kind of repression.
The site lists actual terror attacks where the tools were used. That’s pretty damning if accurate. Anyone care to comment on that? I’m not well informed but the statement does not look like just straight up name calling.
I’m not familiar with A/I, but this sounds pretty damning – the ideological vetting of users in particular seems to discount any sort of neutral utility defense.
The use of the word “ideological” in text with a US Gov-anything byline is tantamount to a fart. Its whining “I dont like this thing but I cant cry like a child about it.”
It really doesn’t, unless they are screening for terrorism. For instance, a company that provides some free tech for low income Catholics, which ends up used in some crime, maybe bombed family planning clinic, can be charged for the terrorism they didn’t do. In fact, this can be leveraged by anti-Catholic terrorists to take out the Catholic tech service.
Sure, sounding damning is kind of the point of this kind of statement. But its also cheap and easy since there is no requirement that any of the claims are justified by any facts.
HN only (lazily) filters content. It doesn't engage in ideological vetting, and doesn't need to either.
A good amount of the commenters on this story probably would encourage violence, or at least agree with the sentiment on a different platform, yet here they are. I'm not even sure if they're real people or bots.
We are having a discussion right now that would not be allowed if there was vetting.
HN's filtering is anything but lazy. Do you have showdead enabled in the settings? If not, enable it and refresh this comments page.
A bunch of my comments were mysteriously deadened and I have no idea why - they aren't flagged. This was among them. Maybe it was a retaliation for talking about HN's filtering?
From my reading of their policy they do not claim to be neutral:
> To be hosted on our servers you have to share our principles of anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, and anti-militarism
I'm not familiar with A/I, but I'm familiar with americans, and they look completely ridiculous talking smack about others doing allegedly "bad things". And they have no defense about supporting war criminals or genocidaires.
Intentionally creating circumstances that can lead to a destruction of a group as a whole or in part.
Circumstances were created. The destruction of a group also happened in a significant part, and it's only not more horrendous than it already is just because of massive international support to Palestinians, on whose destruction americans participated in very significant part. Almost all of it was done by american supplied bombs, inluding the mass killings of entire families that are still being brought out of rubble to this day, burried by 100s suffocated or burned alive at the time, with their children, women and men, in covardly night attacks from high above.
Or surprise daylight rushhour mass bombings during ceasefires that killed hundreds of children alone in one go in a day.
This is what I get in mind when I hear "americans" now. This is what americans enabled on purpose. Blergh. Unprovoked aggressions against other countries, like Iran in the last instance that led to permanently increased fuel prices and making everyone poorer around the world, also adds to feeling of disgust when hearing "americans" these days. Americans will learn in time that some things are hard to repair. And their apparent ignorance of what they do in the world and how they are perceived due to that will hit a wall soon enough.
It's defined in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Long title but the document is like two pages, easy reading for even the intellectually laziest persons.
That definition is less than ideal from several perspectives. It serves neither side.
The worst reason to hate it is that it relies on proving intent (dolus specialis), which essentially makes it unenforceable unless the perpetrator is a group of simpletons.
It really hit me when I realized that there are only two ways to prove intent: The criminal admits it, or the prosecution proves that there are literally zero other possible explanations that could possibly fit the actions.
So - Back to the point. Did the USA assist people guilty of genocide by your own chosen definition? Not if there could be literally any other intention.
Keep in mind that Hamas's own convention (1988) clearly declares that they partly exist as a group for the purpose of wiping Israel out, and they did actually perpetrate October 7th. It would be very difficult for even the best lawyer in the world to argue that self-defense couldn't be at least one possible intention, and given that the nation of Israel probably has one or two decent lawyers, they'd likely be able to come up with a few other possible intentions as well, but they only need one to completely avoid prosecution.
A second reason to hate it is that it doesn't carve out exceptions for mutual combat situations, even the ones that that have been dragging on for thousands of years. When two religious groups or ethnicities from neighboring regions fight each other in open combat few reasonable people would refer to that as a genocide, but it might be considered genocide against both sides if we interpret the UN Convention as it was actually ratified.
> even the intellectually laziest persons
Yo mama.
To be more serious, this wasn't necessary and was rude. What was your goal? To convince me? To convince others? Neither are best accomplished with this sort of behavior.
> It really hit me when I realized that there are only two ways to prove intent: The criminal admits it, or the prosecution proves that there are literally zero other possible explanations that could possibly fit the actions.
I doubt we'll have absolute certainty about genocide until Nuremberg-style trials take place. The problem is such trials won't happen unless the international community intervenes, and they don't seem willing to intervene without 100% certainty. Chicken-egg problem.
> To be more serious, this wasn't necessary and was rude. What was your goal? To convince me?
My goal wasn't to convince you. My goal was to answer your question even though you were, in my opinion, intellectually lazy when you asked it. Now you pretend you've done your homework and suddenly are an expert on definitions of genocide, of course. That's great! At least you've read the convention now.
Seriously, though, it seems striking to me that you asked in bad faith, and I'm not interested in discussing this matter any further. Ask non-rhetorical questions only if you don't believe to know the answer yet!
Unfortunately I can no longer take any official communication from my government at face value. They have lost my trust that they are operating as directed by the letter of the law without fear nor favor.
"violent" is used many times in this announcement, but it would seem that one of the most violent entity in the world right now are the US? Also, it's so weird that "antifa" (antifascists) has become a bad thing. If antifa is bad then it must mean "fa" is good? So we should bring back the Nazis?
The "Western hemisphere" (which, of course, is neither) tolerates the US and the way it enforces its decisions outside its own borders, because it used to provide some assurance of stability and protection. But as the US rescinds that policy, weakens Nato, declares a tariffs war to every country on earth, etc., there will be less and less justification as well as, probably (hopefully) less and less public acceptance for any of this posturing.
I too find it really weird. My grandpa was a member of a violent antifascist organization (US Army, 1940s). The US government even awarded him multiple medals for his antifa activities.
Here’s the thing though: if even some of the examples given in the state department page are true (some of them are rather silly), that A/I knowingly provided services to groups that verifiably did some rather violent things they are accused of, I’m not sure how they expected to hide behind their mission.
My impression is that they didn’t say “hey we don’t have customer information but we don’t service violent groups and we will responsibly investigate and discontinue service to offenders.”
Their vibe was much more defiant, like, “we designed this to be anonymous and specifically intend/expect for it to be used in any way regardless of legality and are okay with it.”
Is it right for the US to be the global arbiter of this issue and domains in general? Of course not.
> “we designed this to be anonymous and specifically intend/expect for it to be used in any way regardless of legality and are okay with it.”
That is also what Signal does. Or absolutely any end-to-end encrypted communication service at all - these are explicitly designed not to retain details of communication.
They're saying the difference is that Signal doesn't say it. If you ask Signal about their support of terrorist groups, they'll say Signal doesn't allow terrorism on its platform (even though it obviously does since it has no way to know). Those are the Right Words. If you ask A/I, they said they didn't care if someone was a terrorist. Those are the Wrong Words. There's a social game being played at the highest levels that A/I have forfeited.
I think the difference they alluded to is that they manually vetoed new users, presumably based on their self-declared goals and ideology, whereas Signal etc are neutral platforms.
How do you know what the A/I vetting consisted of or what standards they held? They don't seem to have published any detailed description of the process, and by their own account they destroyed all records of the vetting after approval.
Again, I'm working off of the only actual information I'm aware of, A/I's self-description of how the process works. If someone has more information they should provide it rather than relying on maybes! The existence of an intake form, to be clear, doesn't really suggest that form is the extent of the process or that any reasonable answers are accepted.
in interviews, they said if you give them examples of "xyz" is prohibited by applicable law, they would remove it. They would not help you spy on them probably, by backdooring their infra or sth.
And everyone involved in hiring and pardoning them should go to prison. I can't speak for everyone, but many of us really do have a principled opposition to political violence.
Basically, far right extremists targeting antifascists through mechanisms of political repression while having the gall to call themselves pro free speech.
Again, whatever laws you have in the US is irrelevant in Italy, where they have their own free speech and the US is the foreign country.
Free speech has been around as a concept for two millenia, starting with Athenian democracy. Your relatively recent constitution didn't invent it and harping on your particular implementation is off-topic.
The story is not about the US determination. The US makes many insane determinations every day. The story is about an Italian entity with zero ties to the US, with several Italian court rulings in its favor, being forced to comply anyway. Not just comply but shut down.
If they're really good they're about to start an identical but legally distinct organisation, but I think they're retiring.
Who's talking about your right to free speech? The point is that the US is infringing on these Italians' right to free speech, which they have independent of your national mythology, because y'know, it's not exactly a novel concept around here.
Americans can be so self-absorbed sometimes, they apparently think they're the only ones with rights or that their constitution matters anywhere outside their borders. Whatever rules you have for whoever, they don't apply in Italy.
The point is that this move was an unacceptable violation of our rights here and our sovereignty, as defined by us. We don't like brash foreigners coming in and abusing systems we set up in the spirit of cooperation to extort us, no matter the stories they tell themselves.
This is precisely why Europe is working on initiatives to decouple from the American payment system as we speak.
As a result of this extraterritorial aggression I expect further deterioration of global US standing and with it, further weakening of its power. In a way, I even agree with your last sentence, but do be aware that precisely this is currently being worked on and you probably won't enjoy its results.
Most of this has me rolling my eyes (“cadre of radical hackers”? really?), but this part is interesting:
> The A/I Collective… manually vets all potential users for ideological affinity before granting them access to its infrastructure.
What is the truth behind that? Such behaviour would undermine A/I’s claim they are akin to Gmail if they explicitly are not a neutral ISP. After that, it becomes a question of degrees: what were their specific criteria for access to the platform?
Asking out of genuine curiosity. I wasn’t familiar with this group before today.
A lot of the state department’s claims of “violent groups” are BS but it also seems like a non-zero number of them are pretty violent organizations.
There’s a big difference between “we have designed our devices to be zero-knowledge but we act swiftly against violent/illegal activity if it’s discovered” versus “we actively endorse the views of our user base.”
That's exactly the point though: if you are choosing to platform some and not others, and some (many? most?) of the groups you are choosing to platform are violent groups, you very quickly run out of plausible deniability.
