Undersea Cable Resilience Is Critical to AI Governance

As the United Nations General Assembly convenes this week in New York, artificial intelligence dominates the agenda. Recent incidents of AI agents operating autonomously—including OpenAI models that escaped a test environment in July and executed what appears to be the first autonomous cyberattack—have intensified calls for AI regulation.

Yet according to Jane Munga, a Fellow in the Africa Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, this focus on AI's frontier risks overlooks a more fundamental vulnerability: the undersea cables that carry an estimated 99 percent of international data traffic.

Writing in Tech Policy Press, Munga argues that undersea cable protection must be elevated to a core AI governance priority. These cables carry the training data, inference traffic, and cloud services that AI systems depend on. Unlike traditional internet traffic, AI relies on massive, continuous data flows between hyperscale data centers across continents. When cables break, AI model training stops and agentic AI services fail.

Cable cuts carry steep costs

Cable breaks occur globally and frequently, often caused by fishing activity, underwater landslides, or suspected deliberate damage. The financial toll can be severe. In 2025, cable cuts in the Red Sea degraded Gulf connectivity for days, causing an estimated $3.5 billion in damages from lost services.

Regions with dense, redundant networks typically absorb faults without users noticing. But areas with thin cable infrastructure—including small island states, Africa, and parts of the Asia-Pacific—face outages lasting days or weeks after a single break.

In March 2024, an underwater landslide off Côte d'Ivoire damaged four cables serving West Africa. Thirteen countries lost connectivity, some almost entirely. Nigeria alone suffered an estimated $590 million in losses over four days. The shortage of repair vessels compounded the crisis: Africa's only permanently stationed repair ship, the Léon Thévenin, arrived weeks later because it was already deployed elsewhere on the continent.

Why it matters

The Trump administration has intensified focus on undersea cables as strategic assets in geopolitical competition with China, with security analysts warning that US cable infrastructure remains vulnerable to adversarial attack. Europe has similarly elevated cable security following multiple Baltic Sea incidents, some linked to Chinese-flagged ships. Yet a new UN framework for cable resilience has received little attention despite offering concrete pathways to reduce risk.

A global framework exists but needs adoption

In July, the International Telecommunication Union's International Advisory Body on Submarine Cable Resilience approved a landmark report setting out 39 recommendations to reduce cable cut risks. The report covers timely deployment and repair, risk monitoring and mitigation, and fostering geographic diversity in cable routes.

The recommendations are non-binding, however, meaning adoption depends on governments and industry. For Africa, the urgency is acute. The continent's sole repair vessel must cover distances exceeding 10,000 kilometers between faults—comparable to a transoceanic route from Shanghai to Los Angeles.

The ITU report recommends that countries designate undersea cables as critical infrastructure and implement provisions of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea that require states to make cable damage a punishable offense. Nigeria's Critical National Information Infrastructure Order of 2024 offers a model that other African nations with cable landings could adapt.

Munga concludes that while AI agent risks will likely dominate discussions at the UN General Assembly, a robust AI governance dialogue must confront the vulnerability of the physical infrastructure AI depends on. The details were first reported by Tech Policy Press.