The UN AI agenda must prioritize submarine cables

Tech Policy Press published an article calling on the UN General Assembly to include submarine cable protection in the AI governance agenda. The article notes that submarine cables carry about 99% of global international data traffic, supporting AI training data flows, inference traffic, cloud services, and cross-continental training cluster interconnections; a break can interrupt model training and agent services. Most damage stems from human activity, especially fishing, and suspected sabotage has risen in recent years; in regions with insufficient network redundancy, single points of failure can last days or even weeks—for example, in March 2024, an underwater landslide near Côte d'Ivoire damaged four cables in West Africa, cutting off internet for 13 countries, with Nigeria estimated to have lost $590 million in four days.