Here is the State Department's rationale: https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
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.
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.
Seems quite specific to me.
And maybe they used a Google camera for taking photos of their acts.
By the same logic, what prevents US from labelling Signal, Proton, and Google as ones supporting terrorist organizations?
Are those terrorist organizations too?
Moreover, ask yourself: why hasn't Germany accused A/I of being co-responsible of the attacks?
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.
Now, what about A/I group? Ah… well, there is your answer.
Yes, in my local food distribution networks here in France, quite a few people had autistici emails registered on our mailing list.
Don't talk about something you don't know like you do and you're smarter than anyone.
I’m sure their helpful functions will be picked up by another group that wants to do good work without USAID money.
This is the standard of communication for the Trump administration.
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.
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?
By this logic any right wing message board would be designated terrorists the moment one person who has posted there commits a violent act.
This is meant to chill domestic left-wing activism. Just like the person who got 30 years for delivering some zines (https://freedom.press/issues/texas-man-sentenced-to-30-years... https://portside.org/2026-06-25/injustice-how-leftist-zines-...)
> 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
It is the first line of https://www.inventati.org/who/policy
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.
Like this thing: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/5/gaza-teams-recover-r...
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Do you want to declare them terrorists too?
Now, if you are against private conversations, please state so clearly so we know which side of the fence you lean towards.
Meanwhile, Signal requires a phone number, so it knows much more about your identity than A/I did.
Several fediverse instances have the same thing. It's just a freeform textbox saying why do you want an account.
If that's disqualifying, a lot of US government contractors are in trouble.
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.
always has been
Pun intended?
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/trumps-nspm-7-labels-commo...
> 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.”