Anthropic says Claude AI was used to build a Malaysian election manipulation platform

Headcount is the cost that moved in the Malaysian case. "Basically AI is just mimicking what we would have, I guess, termed a few years ago, a troll factory," said Rossine Fallorina of Sigla, a Philippine thinktank that researches AI ^[8]. "So you don't need 10 people to create a narrative or a story. You can just prompt it and then have it propagated." ^[8] The Malaysian platform was a commercial product ^[1]. Anthropic's report lists "private firms selling influence" among the actors it found, alongside "governments, state-aligned propaganda institutions and state media" ^[5].

Anthropic could act because the writing ran through its own model. The Guardian's account does not say what the intervention involved, or whether X moved against the roughly 1,000 accounts the operation used ^[1][3].

The skeptic's case comes from Katie Harbath, who worked on public policy for global elections at Meta and now heads the consultancy Anchor Change ^[6]. "AI can supercharge it in terms of you can make a lot more content that's more personalised, quicker and cheaper," she said. "But you still need a distribution mechanism, and at the moment, that's still your more social media type platforms." ^[7] I think she is right about reach, and the Malaysian figures fit her. About 1,000 accounts spread evenly over 222 constituencies is roughly four and a half per seat ^[1]. With so few accounts per seat, the scale sat in the content: the operation pulled census and electoral data to work on fractures of race, religion and royalty ^[2]. The model's owner sees that writing, and X sees the accounts.

The trade-off for vendors is coverage. OpenAI's Philippine account bans last year ^[9] and Anthropic's Malaysian intervention ^[3] each removed operators from one company's model. In my view a commercial seller has every reason to move its buyers to whichever model has not yet banned it ^[1]. The posts still travel on the platforms Harbath named ^[7]. Vendor policing then covers production one model at a time.

The election calendar leaves time to plan. Malaysia's general election could be called for late 2027, the Philippines and Cambodia hold polls in 2028, and Indonesia votes in 2029 ^[10][2]. "It feeds political polarisation and it feeds on divisions," said Bridget Welsh of the University of Nottingham Asia Research Institute Malaysia ^[13]. The choice in front of vendors and platforms this quarter is whether to build a channel for passing account-level findings between them. Without one, Malaysia's general election becomes the first test of vendor and platform defences running separately ^[10].