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A commercial platform allegedly used artificial intelligence to profile Malaysian voters, operate about 1,000 fake X accounts and spread fabricated political allegations, according to a new threat intelligence report by US-based AI company Anthropic.
This was shared by Eric See To on his Facebook page, where he cited a report by Anthropic.
According to the report, the operation allegedly targeted Malaysia constituency by constituency and used real census and electoral data to identify political and social fault lines across all 222 parliamentary constituencies.
Anthropic said it identified and removed an account that used its Claude AI models to run what it described as a commercial election-manipulation platform.
Anthropic said that the platform was marketed as an “influence-as-a-service” capability and was linked by Anthropic investigators to Istanbul-based technology company BBS Bilisim Teknolojileri.
Anthropic said the platform’s own documentation described the system as a “military-grade, AI-driven, real-time political operations ecosystem”.
The company said the operation involved a network of roughly 1,000 fake X accounts, a fake news outlet called Malaysia Pulse and fabricated intelligence dossiers targeting an opposition politician and civil society organisations.
Targeting Malaysia’s Political Fault Lines
Anthropic said the operators had ingested real census and electoral data and built a constituency-targeting system covering the country’s 222 parliamentary seats. The system was allegedly designed to target sensitive political and social issues, including race, religion and royalty.
The accounts were allegedly equipped with measures to evade detection, including regularly renewing cookies and IP addresses. Anthropic said its investigation found a dashboard allowing operators to determine how many artificial views should be generated for individual targets.
In one instance, the system recorded a request for one million artificial views on the account of Malaysia’s sitting Prime Minister. However, Anthropic stressed that engagement figures recorded by the platform were self-reported by the operators and could not be independently verified.
AI Used To Build And Run Operation
According to Anthropic, Claude was used throughout the operation, including to build custom dashboards for managing the fake-account network, track engagement metrics, develop the voter-targeting system and support the creation and rewriting of fabricated content.
Anthropic classified the campaign as Category Two on its Breakout Scale, meaning the assets were distributed across multiple platforms but there was no evidence they had broken into authentic communities.
Anthropic said the case demonstrated how AI could potentially allow relatively small groups to conduct influence operations at greater speed and scale.
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