The Trump administration is withdrawing the United States from a handful of international organizations that work to strengthen cybersecurity.

As part of a broader pullback from 66 international organizations, the administration is leaving the Global Forum on Cyber Expertise, the Online Freedom Coalition and the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats.

Trump’s decision is in line with a president who has expressed hostility toward the existing international order, an approach critics fear creates a leadership power vacuum for U.S. adversaries to fill.

“The Trump Administration has found these institutions to be redundant in their scope, mismanaged, unnecessary, wasteful, poorly run, captured by the interests of actors advancing their own agendas contrary to our own, or a threat to our nation’s sovereignty, freedoms, and general prosperity,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement Thursday. “President Trump is clear: It is no longer acceptable to be sending these institutions the blood, sweat, and treasure of the American people, with little to nothing to show for it. The days of billions of dollars in taxpayer money flowing to foreign interests at the expense of our people are over.”

Rubio criticized the international organizations over “DEI mandates,” “‘gender equity’ campaigns” and activities that “constrain American sovereignty.”

The Global Forum on Cyber Expertise works on issues such as critical infrastructure protection, cybercrime, cyber skills and policy and emerging technology. Its members include nations and government organizations like Interpol, but also tech companies like Hewlett Packard, Mastercard and Palo Alto Networks.

The forum says it supports gender inclusivity, asserting that “gender is a cross cutting issue with direct relevance to achieving international peace and security.”

A former president of the Global Forum on Cyber Expertise Foundation, Chris Painter, said he was “ surprised” by the withdrawal.

“It’s a non-political capacity-building platform that the U.S. helped establish and that has done good work in the Western Balkans and Asian Pacific, among other places, that I think advances U.S. interests,” said Painter, also the former top cyber diplomat at the State Department.

Ron Deibert, a professor of political science and the founder and director of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, said the withdrawal from the forum and the cuts at the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency would “further erode network security coordination at a time when the magnitude of cyber threats are rapidly increasing.”

Nina Jankowicz, a former Biden administration disinformation official who now head of the American Sunlight Project, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting disinformation, took note of the Trump administration — “which claims to care about free speech” — exiting the Freedom Online Coalition, which counts as its goals the support of “free expression, association, assembly, and privacy online.”

The coalition has campaigned against cybersecurity laws that suppress human rights and cyberattacks that imperil individual safety.

The European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats works to protect its members, which include members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, from an array of threats, among them those that manifest in cyberspace.

The Trump administration also withdrew from other organizations whose work more tangentially touches on cybersecurity, such as the International Law Commission.

Whatever flaws there are with some of the organizations Trump withdrew from, they are contributors to the “international rules-based order,” Deibert said 

“Without state participation, especially the powerful rich states, these forums will grind to a halt,” he said. “Even on a symbolic level, having a government like the U.S. ‘not there’ means very little can happen on a global level. This will likely lead to more regionalization and likely greater spaces for corruption and authoritarian practices to spread.”

The U.S. decision will “inevitably weaken the rights and security of Americans and people around the world for years to come,” said Alexandra Givens, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

“Americans should be concerned that their government is abandoning longstanding efforts to advance democracy, defend human rights online, and stop the abuses of spyware, particularly as free expression comes under attack from governments around the world — including our own,” Givens said. “U.S. participation in international collaboration on human rights standards helps keep Americans safe.”

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The FBI said that unknown actors have continued to deploy AI voice cloning tools in an ongoing effort to impersonate U.S government officials and extract sensitive or classified information or conduct scams.

The bureau initially warned back in May that the campaign had been ongoing since at least April 2025. In an update Friday, they revised that initial timeline and said there was evidence of such activity dating back to 2023.

“Activity dating back to 2023 reveals malicious actors have impersonated senior U.S. state government, White House, and Cabinet level officials, as well as members of Congress to target individuals, including officials’ family members and personal acquaintances,” the FBI said in a public service announcement.

These communications include the use of encrypted apps like Signal and AI-powered voice cloning tools to trick victims into believing they’re speaking with high-level government officials, who have regularly used Signal to discuss government business under the Trump administration.

The FBI’s updated timeline would mean that such impersonation efforts may have stretched back to the Biden administration, though the bureau does not specify how many individuals, groups or actors may have been involved over the years.

The update also includes new details around the specific tactics and talking points the impersonators use to ensnare victims.

After starting off by engaging the victim through SMS texting, introducing themselves and suggesting that due to the sensitive nature of the discussions, they move to encrypted messaging apps like Signal or WhatsApp, as well as messaging apps like Telegram.

Once there, the fake government official will engage the victim on a topic they are known to be well-versed in, then propose scheduling a meeting between them and President Trump or another high-ranking government official, or float the possibility of nomination to a company’s board of directors.

That sets up the victim for requests for more sensitive personal data under the guise of vetting, like passport photos, requests to sync their device with the victim’s phone contact list, requests for the victim to broker introductions between associates or wiring funds overseas.

The bureau notes in footnote that access to the targeted individual’s contact list is used “to enable further impersonation efforts or targeting.”

“Once actors have access to the victim’s contact list, they send out another round of smishing or vishing messages, this time impersonating the last victim or another notable figure the new targeted individual would logically come in contact with,” the announcement stated.

In July, the State Department sent a cable to diplomats warning that someone was using AI audio tools and text messages to impersonate Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Under the Biden administration in 2024, a deepfake video of former State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller popped up online appearing to suggest that Russian cities were legitimate targets for Ukraine’s military.

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