US AI Firm Reveals Claude Misuse to Promote CS Opiyo Wandayi

US artificial intelligence company Anthropic has disclosed a coordinated political influence operation in Kenya in which its Claude AI platform was used to produce social media content promoting Energy Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi.

The actor used Claude to generate batches of exactly 50 posts, instructing the AI to make them appear as spontaneous grassroots commentary rather than part of an organised campaign.

Much of the content praised Wandayi for stopping a scheduled Kenya Power electricity tariff increase and promoted hashtags including #PowerReliefKE and #PoweringTheNewKenya.

The network also circulated claims that the United Opposition coalition was breaking apart ahead of the 2027 General Election, targeting former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua and former President Uhuru Kenyatta.

How Claude Was Used in the Campaign

The operator supplied Claude with political topics, talking points and hashtags before asking it to turn them into character-counted posts prepared for publication across social media platforms.

In several sessions, the generated material was placed in an interactive copy-all format, allowing multiple posts to be collected and deployed as part of the campaign.

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Anthropic found that the actor used the same AI workflow for a separate marketing operation involving Kenyan retail brands. That activity operated under the personas “SHANKI” and “Elkins Marketer”.

Investigation established that the political messages were not isolated posts but part of a structured effort involving multiple inauthentic accounts that were coordinated around common talking points and presented the material as if it reflected independent public opinion.

Anthropic said it found no evidence of government involvement and assessed the operation as a domestic Kenyan campaign.

Campaign Failed to Reach Real Users

Despite the coordinated production of political content, the operation failed to gain meaningful traction outside the network involved in spreading it.

Anthropic classified the activity as Category One on its Breakout Scale after finding that the campaign remained isolated within fake accounts and local influences on a single platform.

This assessment means the operation did not reach or influence genuine users beyond its own network, limiting the wider impact of the manufactured political messaging.

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Anthropic subsequently removed the account used in the campaign as well as the organisation behind it. It also developed new detection systems based on the behavioural patterns identified during the investigation.

Investigations followed a tip from OpenAI about recidivist activity on its platform. That information prompted Anthropic to investigate suspected coordinated inauthentic behaviour linked to the Kenyan operation.

The company said the new detections are intended to help identify similar attempts to misuse Claude for organised influence campaigns.

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CS for Energy and Petroleum James Opiyo Wandayi. PHOTO/X