Malaysia targeted by election manipulation operation using 1,000 fake accounts, bogus news site: Anthropic
Anthropic says its Claude AI was used to build a voter-targeting system covering all 222 parliamentary constituencies in Malaysia, while the threat actor also unsuccessfully pursued a contract with the country’s communications regulator.
Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has dismantled a sophisticated election manipulation operation targeting Malaysia, uncovering a network of 1,000 fake social media accounts and a fabricated news site. Utilizing Anthropic's Claude AI models, the threat actors sought to profile and target voters by constituency across all 222 parliamentary constituencies.
The operation, active between December 2025 and August 2026, employed AI to scrape legitimate Malaysian news reports and rewrite them, while also generating fabricated intelligence reports to spread false allegations against opposition politicians and civil society organizations. The platform, posing as a cyber intelligence and counter-disinformation tool, was developed and sold by Istanbul-based technology company BBS Bilisim Teknolojileri under a paid influence-as-a-service model.
Despite the scale and complexity of the infrastructure, Anthropic found no evidence that the campaign succeeded in obtaining a contract with Malaysia's national communications regulator.
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