Not to be too pessimistic, but it strikes me that in a worst case scenario, severing a cable might scale to severing global digital communications which is itself a massive worst case scenario even if we removed AI from the picture.

If the worst case outcome is we have to even temporarily shut down global shipping, banking, transport, health services, communications and national infrastructure to contain a self-propagating misaligned AI that can evolve itself and work its way into any sufficiently large computer system to escape humans preventing it from finishing its task, that seems like something we should be trying very hard to avoid.