June 4, 2026 – Copper thieves and infrastructure vandals are no longer just a nuisance, they are a national security threat, and artificial intelligence is making them more dangerous, a federal regulator said Thursday.

Olivia Trusty, commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, delivered the warning at the 4th National Summit on Protecting Critical Communications Infrastructure in Philadelphia, where she laid out a surge in attacks and called on Congress to close gaping holes in the federal response.

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Between June 2024 and June 2025, nearly 16,000 reported incidents of theft and vandalism hit communications infrastructure across the United States, knocking out service for close to 10 million customers, Trusty said.

The pace is accelerating: the first half of 2025 alone saw 9,770 incidents, nearly double the prior six months. Societal costs from the attacks, including lost productivity and disrupted emergency services, reached between $38 million and $188 million in just the second half of 2024.

"Infrastructure vandalism is both a property crime and a national security vulnerability," Trusty said.

Not petty theft

Trusty pushed back hard on the idea that infrastructure vandalism is a minor, scattered problem. What investigators increasingly see, she said, is not opportunistic thieves with wire cutters, it is organized, coordinated actors targeting fiber routes, cell towers, and backup power systems with enough precision and planning to take down 911 dispatch centers, disrupt military installations, and cut off hospital communications.

More than half of copper theft incidents are concentrated in California and Texas, according to NCTA data. But Trusty rejected any reading of that as a regional concern. The attacks, she said, hit every state.

Rural America the most exposed, least protected

Rural communities are on the front lines, Trusty argued, and they are fighting with the oldest weapons. Much of rural America still runs on legacy copper, easier to steal than fiber, harder to monitor remotely, and strung across vast distances with minimal security.

When a rural network goes down, recovery takes longer, redundancy is thinner, and the stakes are immediate. As Trusty put it: a grandmother cut off from her doctor, a small business owner watching transactions disappear, a 911 dispatcher staring at a console that isn't responding.

“The communities that were last to get connected with next-generation networks may now become the most vulnerable to being disconnected,” she said.

Bad actors beginning to use AI

The sharpest portion of Trusty's remarks focused on artificial intelligence.

Bad actors, she warned, are beginning to use AI tools to identify the highest value nodes in a network, coordinate simultaneous attacks across multiple sites, and shift their patterns specifically to frustrate investigators. Combine that with dark web marketplaces, she said, and the expertise required to execute a coordinated infrastructure attack drops dramatically.

“We are not seeing widespread, confirmed misuse of AI in domestic infrastructure vandalism cases, yet,” Trusty said. “But the trajectory and potential for harm is clear, and the capability is developing faster than our defenses.”

Trusty pointed to a March 2026 Order that cleared away regulatory friction blocking the copper-to-fiber transition, freeing up what she said could be tens of billions of dollars in private capital currently tied up in legacy network maintenance.

Fiber, she argued, removes the primary economic incentive driving theft, it has no scrap value, while also enabling remote monitoring, faster rerouting after attacks, and the modern infrastructure that AI-powered defenses require.

“You cannot run the defenses of the future on the infrastructure of the past,” she said.

On Capitol Hill, Trusty urged Congress to pass H.R. 2784, the Stopping the Theft and Destruction of Broadband Act, which would extend federal criminal protections to privately owned networks. Twenty-eight states now treat infrastructure vandalism as a felony, she noted, but 22 do not, leaving a patchwork that organized attackers can exploit.

“Copper theft is an attack on American infrastructure,” Trusty said. “Fiber vandalism is a potential national security incident. We need to change that calculus.”

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