Kenyan political operator used Claude for election propaganda

A Kenyan political operator used Anthropic’s chatbot Claude to mass-produce social media posts praising government officials and targeting opposition figures ahead of the 2027 general election, the company said in a report.

Anthropic said the operation did not reach or influence real people. But its discovery offers an early glimpse of how generative AI could shape Kenya’s political ecosystem ahead of the next election, enabling actors to manufacture coordinated propaganda that looks like it came from ordinary users.

Anthropic said it identified and removed an account used by a single actor to generate Kenyan political content in batches of exactly 50 tweets. The actor explicitly instructed Claude to make the posts appear to be spontaneous grassroots commentary rather than part of a coordinated campaign.

The content followed a familiar political pattern, with many posts praising Energy Cabinet Secretary (CS) Opiyo Wandayi over a Kenya Power tariff issue and using hashtags such as #PowerReliefKE and #PoweringTheNewKenya. Other posts pushed claims that the United Opposition coalition was breaking apart ahead of the 2027 election and targeted former deputy president Rigathi Gachagua and former president Uhuru Kenyatta.

Anthropic said the campaign used a single playbook to amplify pro-government and anti-opposition narratives, a pattern consistent with a coordinated electoral communications effort. The company stopped short of linking the operation to the Kenyan government or any political party, saying it found no evidence of government involvement.

“We found no evidence of government involvement,” the report said, describing the activity as consistent with “an entirely domestic Kenyan operation.” Anthropic said the network’s pro-administration tone and specific hashtags suggested it was plausibly aligned with the ruling coalition, but it could not identify the organisation or people behind it.

The report documents the campaign’s methods more clearly than its political sponsor. An unidentified local actor used AI to produce coordinated messaging that resembled public sentiment, but Anthropic could not establish who funded or directed the effort.

The case also offers a more precise picture of AI’s role because the same actor used an almost identical workflow to market Kenyan retail brands under a separate marketing persona. The operator supplied the political topics, talking points, and hashtags, then used Claude to turn them into large batches of platform-ready posts.

“The core ideological messages were completely decided by the actors before Claude was used,” Anthropic said. AI helped the operator produce large volumes of content that made coordinated political messaging appear organic. 

Anthropic classified the Kenyan operation as Category One on the Breakout Scale, meaning the activity remained contained within its own network of fake accounts and local influencers on a single platform. The company said it found no evidence that the campaign reached or influenced real people.

Kenya is also not alone in appearing in recent disclosures about political or information operations involving generative AI. In January 2025, OpenAI disrupted election-related AI activity in Ghana, and Anthropic’s latest report also identifies an influence operation targeting audiences in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

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