The United States has placed an Italy-based technology collective on its global terrorism sanctions list, accusing it of supplying encrypted infrastructure used by violent far-left groups in America and across Europe.
The State Department and Treasury designated Autistici/Inventati, also called the A/I Collective, a Specially Designated Global Terrorist on 26 August.
The label freezes any assets under US jurisdiction and bars American persons and banks from dealing with the group. Violations can carry civil or criminal penalties.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said far-left terrorism was “a profound threat to the United States and the broader West”.
Washington, he added, had sanctioned Autistici/Inventati as “a major far-left tech collective whose services are used by the most active and violent Antifa cells in the United States and across the world”.
The official notice describes A/I as an Italy-based extremist organisation that builds encrypted email and chat, web hosting, video conferencing and anonymity tools.
It says the collective screens users for ideological alignment and claims to host about 16,000 mailboxes, 1,500 websites, 5,500 mailing lists and 10,000 blogs. Militants, the department says, use those services to share target lists, tactical manuals and claims of responsibility.
The A/I Collective builds and provides the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells and other radical left-wing networks in the United States and across the world.
Today, the United States is designating this extremist group as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist.
— Department of State (@StateDept) August 26, 2026
A State Department memo obtained by Fox News Digital names Portland’s Rose City Antifa as a user of the services and says a media outlet on the network circulated material to Hamas, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and similar organisations.
The memo says Rose City Antifa also used A/I Collective tools to circulate personal information on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and to call for targeted attacks on agents “in their homes” and in public.
Katie Daviscourt of The Post Millennial has reported that the Portland blog Rose City Counter-Info has published names, photos and alleged home addresses of ICE personnel. It runs on a Noblogs address.
The State Department says anarchist cells that sabotaged railways in France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands in 2026 used A/I tools to claim the attacks and to circulate instructions for improvised incendiary devices.
The same infrastructure, it says, was used by those who claimed the March sabotage of the Transalpine Pipeline, which briefly halted crude oil flows to Austria, Germany and the Czech Republic, and by Germany’s Vulkangruppe after a January strike that cut power to about 45,000 Berlin households.
The attack also hit some 2,000 businesses and left parts of the city dark for five days.
In Italy, the department says anarchists damaged a rail line during the Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics, then posted a claim and manifesto on an A/I-hosted site.
The high-speed Rome-Florence line was cut on February 14 with rudimentary explosive devices, causing €455,000 of damage.
Italian authorities arrested seven people on charges of terrorist association and subversion of the democratic order. A Rome investigating judge ordered the arrests on June 16, remanding five in custody and placing two under house arrest.
The same package of measures also designated the British group Palestine Action, proscribed in the UK in July 2025, and the transnational network Masar Badil, which the Treasury called a front for the Samidoun network.
Treasury papers further allege that Autistici/Inventati has supplied services to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is listed as a terrorist organisation by the US, the UK and the European Union.
Autistici/Inventati was founded in Italy in 2001 as a volunteer project offering free, non-commercial digital tools.
It describes itself as antifascist, anticapitalist and antimilitarist.
The collective has rejected the accusations in full. Italian outlets report that it presents its work as “digital self-defence” for activists and associations. Its statement said antifascism and anticapitalism were not terrorism and that protesting was not terrorism.
The designation is a US administrative measure under Executive Order 13224, not an Italian court finding and not an EU listing. The Italian outlet Formiche noted that it produces no automatic ban in Italy or the EU.
US treasury secretary Scott Bessent said the administration would “cut the financial lifelines” of far-left extremists and their enablers.
You know what this means? The Feds have traced Portland Antifa’s blog, “Rose City Counter-Info,” to a designated foreign terror tech company.
Authorities likely know who is behind the blog, or are closing in on it. The blog is where Antifa members issue claims of responsibility… https://t.co/p6hpO9bxNu
— Katie Daviscourt 📸 (@KatieDaviscourt) August 26, 2026
Swedish researcher and journalist Christian Peterson has argued for a long time that far-left violence in Europe and the United States depends on a small number of people who hide domains, host doxxing sites and keep donation pages online.
In his reporting on the matter he mapped Swedish, Danish, German and Swiss Antifa outing sites and said the real pressure point is “material support”, the anonymising layer that lets groups publish names, addresses and calls to action while staying beyond local police.
He warned that that an SDGT designation alone would not stop at a collective logo. Cutting their funding and infrastructure is also needed.
European capitals have neither endorsed the Italian listing nor pushed back.
Earlier this summer, Rubio launched an international initiative to elevate violent far-left extremism to a global counterterrorism priority, arguing that governments have spent decades focusing on Islamist and right-wing threats while overlooking a growing wave of politically motivated attacks by left-wing militants.
