Before January 1, 2028, will a coordinated, large-scale shutdown or disconnection of global internet infrastructure occur as an emergency response to a catastrophic AI-caused event (such as AI-driven global financial market manipulation or an AI-orchestrated global IT/critical-infrastructure hack)?

probability: 1%

rationale:

To reach a YES resolution before January 1, 2028, a strict and unprecedented conjunction of events must occur: an AI system must cause catastrophic global damage, and authorities must respond with a deliberate, substantial, multi-country shutdown of internet infrastructure specifically attributed to the AI. Current evidence indicates that AI offensive capabilities, while advancing, remain far below the threshold required to trigger systemic global collapse. The most significant AI-orchestrated cyber incident to date—the espionage campaign disrupted by Anthropic in November 2025 (GTG-1002)—relied heavily on human intervention, targeted a limited number of entities, and caused no infrastructure damage 2 sources. While organizations like the Five Eyes, IMF, and Bank of England have raised valid anticipatory warnings regarding AI's potential to accelerate cyber exploitation and exacerbate systemic financial risks 66 sources, actual incidents have not materialized as cascading catastrophes. Even conditional on a major AI-driven catastrophe, a multi-country shutdown of global internet infrastructure is highly unlikely. Standard cyber incident response playbooks, such as those from CISA, heavily emphasize targeted containment—isolating affected networks and air-gapping specific systems—rather than disconnecting broad internet backbone or multi-country infrastructure cisa.gov. Shutting down significant portions of the internet would be economically ruinous and technically complex. Proposals for AI-specific 'kill switches' (such as those analyzed by RAND) focus on localized, data-center-level disconnections, explicitly avoiding broad global shutdowns rand.org. Furthermore, organizations like the Internet Society emphasize maintaining connectivity to limit technical cross-border fallout, creating strong incentives against a coordinated shutdown internetsociety.org. It is also critical to distinguish this scenario from recent large-scale disruptions, which do not meet the criteria. The massive July 2024 CrowdStrike outage and various 2025-2026 Cloudflare disruptions were the result of routine software updates and internal configuration errors, not malicious AI activity 44 sources. Similarly, while hundreds of internet shutdowns occur annually, they are virtually all single-country, government-imposed blackouts for domestic political control or censorship (such as Iran's nationwide shutdown in early 2026), entirely unrelated to AI 2 sources. In summary, the roughly 1.5-year horizon to January 2028 leaves very little time for the requisite discontinuous leap in AI capabilities, let alone for a profound shift in global incident-response protocols. The probability is overwhelmingly constrained by the necessity of a deliberate, multi-country internet disconnection—a drastic measure contrary to established cyber-defense practices. A very low estimate strictly accounts for the extreme tail risk of a sudden, unexpectedly severe AI capability jump prompting a panicked, overreactive international response.