Autistici/Inventati and US Terrorism Sanctions: What the 2026 Designation Means

For the past week, the website autistici.org has been inaccessible after Autistici/Inventati (A/I), a small collective of Italian volunteers and digital activists, was designated a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” and added to the US sanctions list.

The official announcement is available on the US Department of State website.

What Is A/I?

On March 3, 2001, roughly ten people gathered at the LOA hacklab in Milan around a computer assembled from discarded machinery. A bank had sold them an old server for the symbolic price of 15,000 lire, about eight dollars. They expanded it with scavenged components, including a hard drive pulled from someone’s home computer. Nobody arrived with a formal blueprint. Software packages were considered one at a time. Every decision was discussed until everyone agreed. Deliberately, the least technically experienced person was placed at the keyboard. The process took far longer than necessary because efficiency was not the only objective. Everyone was supposed to understand what they were building. That day, one participant later recalled, was when they declared: “A/I now exists.”

This account appears in “The Server Called Paranoia,” an article on the history of the A/I collective published by Sabot Media.

In simple terms, A/I is a long-established digital collective. More specifically, it is a self-managed, nonprofit group of technology specialists and activists that provides free digital services focused on privacy and security.

These services include encrypted email accounts, mailing lists, online communication tools, and web hosting for associations, collectives, and individuals seeking protection from commercial tracking and surveillance.

Among the project’s central principles are the right to privacy and the right to use encryption.

Why Was A/I Designated?

According to the official explanation, the collective was added to the US terrorism sanctions list as part of an effort to counter far-left extremism.

The target of the measure is not an organization accused of directly carrying out an attack, but a technology infrastructure provider alleged to have supplied services to people involved in violent activity. The designation of a provider of web hosting and communications infrastructure is what makes the case unusual.

This is where the central dispute lies. The US government considers hosting, anonymization, and encrypted communications to be part of the infrastructure that enables terrorist networks to operate. The collective, by contrast, argues that providing political and social movements with secure communications and privacy tools does not amount to endorsing or supporting their actions.

The case of the Italian collective therefore extends beyond counterterrorism policy. It directly raises questions about the role of digital intermediaries, the right to anonymity, and the distinction between providing technological tools and bearing responsibility for how users employ them.

The group says it categorically rejects “every single accusation” and has reaffirmed its commitment to providing “a platform of tools for digital self-defense” so that people can communicate freely and securely.

“We will not back down, we will keep doing what we have been doing all these years,” the collective wrote, accusing the US administration of trying to divert attention from its own actions.

The designation of A/I forms part of the Trump administration’s latest counterterrorism policy targeting far-left groups. The 2026 United States Counterterrorism Strategy, published in May, identifies so-called “Violent Left-Wing Extremists” as one of the principal threats to US security. It places them within the same strategic framework as better-known jihadist groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, as well as drug cartels.

It is worth noting that the strategy does not make equivalent mention of neo-Nazi or other far-right organizations, despite their presence in the United States.

Different Legal Frameworks

In Italy, A/I and other informal anarchist groups are generally not treated as terrorist associations under the prevailing case law of the Court of Cassation. Ideological affiliation alone is not sufficient for anti-terrorism legislation to apply, as active material participation must also be established. This is a substantial difference.

Like its US counterpart, Italian anti-terrorism law also provides for measures such as asset freezing. The difference is that such measures are subject to judicial safeguards and may be challenged before a court.

Administrative action alone is not sufficient, unlike in the United States, where sanctions of this kind are casually imposed through executive action by the State and Treasury departments.

An Italian organization can thus face the immediate, potentially disabling consequences of a foreign executive decision before the allegations against it have been examined by an Italian court.

What Will the Sanctions Mean for A/I?

The autistici.org website is currently inaccessible. The freezing of assets is probably the least significant part of the measure, since it is difficult to imagine that a small Italian collective holds substantial assets in the United States.

The real effect of a measure of this kind is that banks, payment systems, hosting providers and connectivity providers may decide to terminate their relationships with the designated organization as a precaution. As Beniamino Irdi’s analysis of the case observes, the designation effectively extends the logic of counterterrorism sanctions to the infrastructure layer.

The Threat of Ostracism

An organization can therefore be effectively excluded from the service market without any ruling having been issued in Italy, and potentially without any criminal proceedings having been opened there.

Put simply, the real coercive force of the US measure lies in making A/I’s services progressively harder to maintain by cutting the collective off from the related services on which it depends.

This shifts much of the decision-making from courts to private intermediaries, whose priority will usually be avoiding sanctions exposure rather than assessing the evidence behind the designation.

The strongest effect could therefore be a form of ostracism, which is one of the most troubling aspects of the case.

The purpose of this article is not to determine whether the US decision to designate the A/I collective as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist is supported by conclusive evidence.

What remains clear, however, is that the case may lead people to ask broader questions about the future of encryption and similar privacy-oriented email, chat and messaging services, an issue that the Keep It Free campaign is continuing to document.