AI plot to divide opposition ahead of 2027 exposed

NAIROBI,Kenya Sep 11 – An artificial intelligence-driven influence operation targeted former President Uhuru Kenyatta and former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua while promoting Energy Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi in a covert social media campaign ahead of Kenya’s 2027 General Election, according to a threat intelligence report by global AI firm Anthropic.

The operation, identified as GTG-54004, allegedly used Anthropic’s Claude AI model to mass-produce political content designed to create the impression of spontaneous grassroots support and opposition to various political figures.

According to the report, a single operator used AI to generate large volumes of social media posts, including narratives portraying the United Opposition as fractured and on the verge of collapse ahead of the 2027 elections.

“The actor used Claude across several sessions to generate batches of exactly 50 tweets, explicitly instructing the model to make posts look like spontaneous grassroots commentary rather than a coordinated campaign,” the report says.

The campaign allegedly targeted Gachagua and Kenyatta as part of efforts to portray divisions within the opposition movement.

“Additionally, the network pushed stories claiming that Kenya’s United Opposition coalition was breaking apart before the 2027 general election, directly targeting politicians Rigathi Gachagua and former president Uhuru Kenyatta,” Anthropic said.

The operation also pushed favourable messaging around Wandayi, particularly over his role in halting a scheduled electricity tariff increase.

The campaign used hashtags including #PowerReliefKE and #PoweringTheNewKenya, with the AI-generated posts presented as if they were independent commentary by ordinary social media users.

The report says the operator supplied Claude with pre-drafted topics, talking points and hashtags before instructing the model to make the content appear more natural and human.

The same AI-assisted workflow was also allegedly used for commercial marketing campaigns, raising questions about whether techniques developed for advertising were being repurposed for political influence.

“Separately, the actor ran the identical AI workflow for Kenyan retail brands under a marketing persona, ‘SHANKI’/‘Elkins Marketer,’” the report says.

The operation reportedly used templates and similar instructions across both political and commercial campaigns. The posts were generated in batches and packaged to allow multiple messages to be copied and published at once.

Anthropic said the activity was designed to manufacture the appearance of organic online engagement rather than simply generate political content.

Despite the scale of the AI-generated material, however, the company assessed that the operation had little impact beyond the accounts involved.

“We evaluated the impact of the network using the Breakout Scale and classified it as Category One. The activity was completely isolated within the network of fake accounts and local influences on a single platform, failing to reach or influence any real people,” the report says.

The assessment places the operation at the lowest level of Anthropic’s impact scale, indicating that the campaign failed to break into wider public discourse or meaningfully influence genuine users.

No evidence of government involvement

Anthropic also found no evidence in the operation linking it directly to the Kenyan government or establishing that it was government-funded. The activity was instead assessed as a domestic Kenyan influence operation.

The network was uncovered following threat intelligence shared by OpenAI concerning suspected repeat misuse of AI systems. Anthropic subsequently banned the accounts involved and deployed additional behavioural detections intended to identify similar activity.

The findings highlight the growing use of generative AI in political communication, particularly the ability to produce large volumes of personalised messages at a speed and scale that would be difficult for a conventional human-run campaign.

While the Kenyan operation did not achieve significant reach, the report illustrates how AI tools can be used to blur the distinction between genuine grassroots political discussion and centrally coordinated messaging as parties and political movements prepare for the 2027 election.