Kenya has been named in a new global threat intelligence report by AI company Anthropic, which says a pro-government operator used its Claude models to prepare fake grassroots social media posts ahead of the country’s 2027 general election.
The disclosure is contained in “Detecting and Countering Misuse of AI: September 2026,” a report Anthropic published this week covering malicious activity it disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026.
Kenya appears in a section of the report dealing with influence operations, where Anthropic says it identified and removed an account used by a single actor to mass-produce Kenyan political content designed to look like spontaneous, grassroots public sentiment.
According to the report, the actor used Claude across several sessions to generate batches of exactly 50 tweets at a time, explicitly instructing the model to make the posts look like organic commentary rather than a coordinated campaign.
Many of the AI-generated tweets praised Energy Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi for halting a scheduled Kenya Power electricity tariff increase, using the hashtags #PowerReliefKE and #PoweringTheNewKenya to drive visibility. The network also pushed narratives claiming Kenya’s United Opposition coalition was breaking apart ahead of the 2027 election, directly targeting politicians Rigathi Gachagua and former president Uhuru Kenyatta.
Anthropic said the same actor separately ran an identical workflow to market Kenyan retail brands under the persona “SHANKI”/”Elkins Marketer,” including a promotional broadcast repackaged as organic tweets with links inserted on every fifth post.
The company said it found no evidence of government involvement and assessed the activity as consistent with a domestic Kenyan operation, though it did not identify the organisation behind it. It described the campaign’s pro-administration tone and specific hashtags as plausibly aligned with the ruling coalition.
Anthropic classified the operation as Category One on its Breakout Scale, the lowest tier, saying the activity remained confined to the network of fake accounts and did not reach or influence real people on the platform.
The report noted that Claude’s main value to the operation was volume and the appearance of authenticity, as the actors fully scripted the underlying political messages before using the AI tool. It also linked the pattern to a broader trend in Kenya in which agencies pay local influencers to push coordinated narratives.
The Kenya case sits within a wider chapter documenting nine influence-operation cases traced to actors in Russia, Iran, Turkey, the Gulf, South Asia, Africa and Europe, targeting audiences across six continents.
Elsewhere in Africa, Anthropic detailed a Russian-linked propaganda operation running through a radio station in Bangui, Central African Republic, tied to the Wagner-linked Africa Corps network. It also described a separate commercial “influence-as-a-service” operation that published thousands of politically slanted articles across roughly 70 fake news sites, with coverage tilted toward the Democratic Republic of Congo’s position in its dispute with Rwanda.
Anthropic said its visibility into such campaigns typically ends once content leaves its platform, since it sits upstream of the social media networks where posts ultimately circulate — a vantage point it said often allows it to disrupt operations before they reach a genuine audience. Once identified, accounts are banned and findings fed back into its detection systems.
The disclosure adds Kenya to a growing list of African markets where AI-generated content has been linked to election-related information manipulation, a trend regional cybersecurity researchers have flagged with increasing frequency as the country heads toward its 2027 poll.
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