Anthropic says a Kenyan political operation used Claude to mass-produce posts designed to look like ordinary citizens were independently supporting government narratives and attacking the opposition.
A Kenyan political operation allegedly turned to artificial intelligence to manufacture the appearance of grassroots support online ahead of the 2027 General Election, according to a new report by AI company Anthropic.
The company says a single actor used its Claude artificial intelligence models to mass-produce Kenyan political content, with instructions to make the posts appear like spontaneous comments from ordinary citizens rather than part of a coordinated political campaign.
The operation, identified by Anthropic as GTG-54004, involved generating batches of exactly 50 posts at a time.
The actor supplied Claude with the political talking points, topics and hashtags before asking the AI to turn them into polished, character-counted posts ready for publication.
Anthropic said the operation was designed around one key objective: making coordinated political messaging look organic.
Wandayi praise, opposition attacks
A significant portion of the posts praised Energy Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi over the government’s handling of a scheduled Kenya Power electricity tariff increase.
The campaign used hashtags including #PowerReliefKE and #PoweringTheNewKenya to amplify the messaging.
But the operation did not stop at praising the government.
According to Anthropic, the same network also pushed narratives claiming that Kenya’s United Opposition was falling apart ahead of the 2027 election, with former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua and former President Uhuru Kenyatta among the political figures targeted by the messaging.
Anthropic described the activity as a political astroturfing operation — a tactic in which coordinated messaging is deliberately made to appear as genuine public opinion.
The revelation is particularly significant in Kenya, where social media has become one of the most important battlegrounds for political messaging ahead of elections.
AI did not create the political agenda
Interestingly, Anthropic says Claude was not responsible for developing the campaign’s political ideology.
The actor had already decided what messages to push.
Claude was then used to make those messages appear more natural, generate them at scale and prepare them for distribution.
Anthropic said the AI was frequently instructed to “humanize and refine” batches of 50 pre-drafted topics and tweets, making volume and the appearance of authenticity the main value it provided to the operation.
In some sessions, Claude reportedly converted the supplied material into 50 themed posts and packaged them in a format that could be copied and deployed.
That means the concern is not simply that AI can write political posts.
It is that one person can use AI to produce what appears to be hundreds or thousands of different voices — potentially making a coordinated campaign look like widespread public sentiment.
Was the Kenyan government behind it?
Anthropic’s report stops short of making that claim.
The company said it found no evidence of government involvement and believes the activity was consistent with a domestic Kenyan operation.
However, Anthropic noted that the campaign’s pro-administration tone and the hashtags used suggested it was plausibly aligned with the ruling coalition.
The exact organisation or individuals behind the operation were not identified.
That distinction is important because the evidence currently points to a pro-administration operation, not a confirmed government-run campaign.
The fake campaign did not reach real people
Despite the elaborate setup, Anthropic said the operation ultimately failed to achieve significant public reach.
The company classified it as Category One on its Breakout Scale, meaning the activity remained confined to the network of fake accounts on a single platform.
Anthropic said it found that the operation did not reach or influence any real people.
The company nevertheless disrupted the campaign, removed the account and organisation behind it, and developed new detection measures based on the operation’s behaviour.
The same AI playbook was used to market businesses
There was another unusual twist.
Anthropic discovered that the actor was using essentially the same workflow to promote Kenyan retail brands under the marketing personas “SHANKI” and “Elkins Marketer.”
The operation could therefore switch from political messaging to commercial promotion using the same system for producing content that appeared organic.
Anthropic said one promotional broadcast was repackaged as supposedly organic tweets, with links inserted into every fifth post.
The company said the case reflected a broader pattern it has observed in Kenya, where agencies can pay influencers to manipulate narratives.
A warning for Kenya’s 2027 election
The Kenyan case is part of a wider Anthropic report examining nine influence operations across different parts of the world.
The company said some of the campaigns it investigated were timed around national elections, while others involved fake social-media identities, fabricated news sites and efforts to disguise coordinated messaging as independent public opinion.
Anthropic’s report covers malicious activity identified and disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026 across seven areas, including influence operations, cyber activity, surveillance, scams, biological misuse, conventional weapons and AI-model distillation.
For Kenya, however, the political implications are particularly striking.
The 2027 election is still ahead, yet AI is already being used in attempts to shape the online information environment — not necessarily by generating spectacular deepfake videos, but through something much harder for an ordinary social-media user to notice: large numbers of apparently ordinary political opinions that may have been manufactured behind the scenes.
And while Anthropic says this particular operation failed to reach genuine users, the case offers a glimpse of how political campaigning could become increasingly automated as Kenya moves closer to the 2027 polls.
