Energy and Petroleum Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi has responded to an Anthropic report detailing an artificial intelligence-driven political campaign that generated social media posts praising him over electricity tariffs.Wandayi said the report did not establish that he, the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum, or any official within the ministry authorised or participated in the alleged online campaign.“My attention has been drawn to some unverified report alleging the creation of some activity on social media that is purported to have been in praise of the actions of the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum regarding electricity tariffs,” Wandayi said on Friday.The CS was responding to Anthropic’s September 2026 threat intelligence report, which identified and disrupted what it described as a coordinated inauthentic behaviour campaign in Kenya.According to the report, a single actor used Anthropic’s Claude AI model to mass-produce Kenyan political content in batches of exactly 50 posts, with instructions to make the messages appear like spontaneous grassroots commentary.A significant portion of the content praised Wandayi over the handling of a scheduled Kenya Power electricity tariff increase and used the hashtags #PowerReliefKE and #PoweringTheNewKenya to increase the visibility of the posts.Anthropic said the actor separately used the same AI workflow to market Kenyan retail brands under the personas “SHANKI” and “Elkins Marketer”.However, the company said it did not know the exact real-world identity of the person behind the operation.The report further stated that the campaign appeared to be a domestic Kenyan operation and that it had found no evidence of government involvement.It said the operation’s pro-government tone and use of specific hashtags suggested it was plausibly aligned with the ruling coalition, but that the organisation responsible had not been identified.On his part, Wandayi said the existence of anonymous and coordinated accounts on social media was not, on its own, evidence of government involvement, arguing that what mattered was proof linking the actors to the ministry.“There are probably millions of anonymous and coordinated accounts on social media pushing different narratives every day. What matters is evidence,” he said.Interestingly, Wandayi’s Friday response also uses the hashtag #PoweringTheNewKenya, the same hashtag Anthropic identified in the campaign that praised him over electricity tariffs. However, the use of the hashtags in his response does not by itself establish a link between the CS and the accounts identified by Anthropic, according to Kenyans.co.ke.
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