As Chinese government agents continue a pattern of malicious hacking into critical U.S. government agencies and infrastructure, experts say that U.S. must draw clear lines regarding the hacking as a planned summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping approaches in September.

On Wednesday, news broke that U.S. officials had broken up a vast hacking operation being conducted by agents of China’s communist regime, which targeted the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Federal Reserve, the Department of Energy, and the Senate as well as power companies and hospital systems. The FBI and the National Security Agency announced that a global network of hacked devices (known as a botnet) had been discovered that was compromising entities and devices in over 130 countries.

According to Brett Leatherman, a cyber official at the FBI, numerous domains that were being utilized by the botnet had been seized and “rendered inoperable.” The hacking scheme, known as “QTFY,” has been operational since 2018 and run by a China-based company called Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology, which the FBI said “sells access to hacked networks and stolen information to China’s foreign and military-intelligence services.”

Experts say that hackers employed by Xi Jinping’s regime utilize the botnets as well as illegal “airport” networks that evade China’s Great Firewall censorship technology as a way for the government to claim that they do not engage in state-sponsored hacking. Thousands of airport networks operate out of China and are “widely advertised on the Telegram messaging system,” according to Stanford University’s Rumaisa Habib. “By using these techniques to blend in with regular users, the Chinese hackers are harder to track and identify,” according to Damon Rouse, an engineer with Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs. “It gives them a massive amount of plausible deniability to utilize networks like this.”

Still, experts like Lt. Col. (Ret.) Robert Maginnis, who serves as senior fellow for National Security at Family Research Council, say that the U.S. must significantly raise the pressure on China when it comes to the breach of vital infrastructure.

“There is an important distinction we ought to make at the outset,” he told The Washington Stand. “President Trump said today that when we complain about China spying on us, we should recognize that the United States spies on China as well. He is right. Espionage among great powers is hardly new, and no serious person should pretend that the United States does not conduct intelligence operations against its adversaries. But espionage is not the same thing as establishing access to America’s power grid, telecommunications systems, hospitals, government networks, and other critical infrastructure that could potentially be exploited or disabled during a crisis or war.”

“That is where I believe the United States must draw a much harder line,” Maginnis emphasized. “The administration was right to dismantle this particular hacker network, but disrupting individual networks is not enough. We have to establish deterrence.”

Maginnis further contended that the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence landscape is making this challenge “considerably more urgent. AI is becoming a force multiplier across the entire spectrum of great-power competition. In cyberspace especially, AI can accelerate reconnaissance, identify vulnerabilities, generate and modify malicious code, automate attacks, analyze stolen information, and allow an adversary to operate at a speed and scale that once required far more people and time. Increasingly, we are not confronting simply hackers using computers. We are confronting hackers employing intelligent machines to multiply their effectiveness.”

“That cuts both ways,” he continued. “The United States must use AI aggressively to strengthen cyber defenses, detect intrusions, identify adversary networks, and disrupt attacks before they can do damage. But defense alone will not create deterrence.

“President Trump should absolutely raise this issue when he meets Xi Jinping next month,” Maginnis underscored. “The message should be clear: the United States understands that nations conduct intelligence operations against one another, but penetrating American critical infrastructure in preparation for possible disruption crosses another threshold. We must be capable not only of defending ourselves but of imposing serious consequences on those who attack us. That means identifying and sanctioning the Chinese companies and individuals supporting these operations, denying them access to American technology and financial systems, working with allies to impose coordinated costs, and maintaining credible cyber capabilities capable of crippling the infrastructure used to attack the United States.”

“The objective is not escalation. It is deterrence,” he insisted. “China should understand that an attack on America’s critical digital infrastructure will not simply be absorbed, patched, and forgotten. The consequences must be sufficiently serious that Beijing concludes the potential price exceeds whatever intelligence or wartime advantage it hopes to gain.”

“That is one of the central realities of the new AI cold war: artificial intelligence is making cyber conflict faster, cheaper, more scalable, and potentially far more destructive,” Maginnis concluded. “Our deterrence strategy must evolve just as rapidly.”