Kenya has been named in a global threat intelligence report by Anthropic, which says a domestic actor used its Claude artificial intelligence (AI) models to mass-produce fake grassroots social media content ahead of the country’s 2027 general election.
The disclosure is contained in Anthropic’s “Detecting and Countering Misuse of AI: September 2026” report, which covers malicious activity the company disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026.
In a section on influence operations, Anthropic says it identified and removed an account used by a single actor to mass-produce Kenyan political content designed to appear as spontaneous, grassroots opinion.
The actor used Claude across several sessions to generate batches of exactly 50 posts at a time, the report says, explicitly instructing the model to make them appear organic rather than orchestrated.
A large share of the AI-generated content praised Kenya’s cabinet secretary for energy and petroleum, James Opiyo Wandayi, for halting a scheduled Kenya Power electricity tariff increase. The posts were amplified using the hashtags #PowerReliefKE and #PoweringTheNewKenya.
The same network pushed narratives claiming Kenya’s United Opposition coalition was fracturing ahead of the 2027 election, naming politicians Rigathi Gachagua and former president Uhuru Kenyatta.
Anthropic said the actor separately ran an identical workflow to market Kenyan retail brands under the persona “SHANKI”/“Elkins Marketer”.
That campaign included a promotional broadcast repackaged as organic posts, with links inserted into every fifth post.
The company said it found no evidence of government involvement and assessed the operation as a domestic Kenyan effort, although it did not identify the organisation responsible.
Anthropic said the campaign’s pro-administration tone and hashtag choices were plausibly aligned with the ruling coalition.
It classified the operation as Category One on its Breakout Scale, the lowest tier in the framework it uses to measure the real-world reach of influence campaigns.
The activity remained confined to the network of fake accounts and did not reach or sway genuine users on the platform, the company said.
The report found that Claude’s main value to the operation was its ability to increase the volume of content and create the appearance of authenticity, while the underlying political messaging had been scripted before the AI tool was used.
The case comes as Kenya develops its AI governance framework.
ITWeb Africa reported in July that the country had opened its draft AI policy for public consultation as part of its National AI Strategy 2025-2030, which is intended to guide the development, adoption and governance of AI and emerging technologies.
Kenya is also expanding its AI infrastructure and policy environment, with the government seeking to increase data centre capacity and AI-enabled cloud infrastructure while reviewing the regulatory framework governing the sector.
Anthropic linked the pattern to a wider, previously documented trend in Kenya in which agencies pay local influencers to promote coordinated narratives.
The Kenya case forms part of a wider chapter documenting nine influence-operation cases tied to actors in Russia, Iran, Turkey, the Gulf, South Asia, Africa and Europe.
Elsewhere in Africa, Anthropic detailed a Russian-linked propaganda operation run through a radio station in Bangui, Central African Republic, which it linked to the Wagner-linked Africa Corps network.
It also described a commercial “influence-as-a-service” operation that published thousands of politically slanted articles across about 70 fake news sites, with coverage skewed towards the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s position in its dispute with Rwanda.
Anthropic said its visibility into such campaigns typically ends once content leaves its platform because it operates upstream of the social media networks where posts ultimately circulate.
The company said this vantage point can allow it to disrupt operations before they reach a genuine audience.
Once an operation is identified, accounts are banned and the findings are fed into Anthropic’s detection systems to identify similar activity in future.
The disclosure adds Kenya to a growing list of African markets where AI-generated content has been linked to election-related information manipulation as the country heads towards its 2027 election.
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