Energy and Petroleum Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi reportedly became the focus of a coordinated political amplification campaign that used Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence to generate social-media content portraying strong public support for the government.
According to a September 2026 report by Anthropic, a Kenyan actor used Claude to produce batches of political posts praising Wandayi and promoting government narratives around electricity prices and other political issues.
The campaign reportedly generated dozens of posts at a time, turning predetermined political talking points into messages designed to resemble spontaneous commentary from ordinary Kenyans.
The activity highlights how generative artificial intelligence is beginning to change Kenya’s political communications landscape, allowing political narratives to be produced at a scale and speed that would previously have required large teams of human content creators.
The reported campaign does not establish that Wandayi personally operated Claude or commissioned the activity. Rather, his name and political profile were reportedly used as part of the messaging generated through the operation.
Among the themes promoted were claims praising Wandayi over electricity tariff measures, alongside hashtags intended to create the appearance of a broader grassroots conversation.
Claude’s role reportedly went beyond simple copywriting. The AI was used to generate multiple variations of similar political messages, helping the campaign create the appearance of different people independently expressing the same views.
That creates a new challenge for voters and journalists: determining whether an apparent surge of online political support represents genuine public sentiment or an artificially amplified campaign.
Anthropic said it found no evidence linking the Kenyan government or Wandayi directly to the operation. The company also assessed that the campaign did not achieve significant breakout into genuine public discourse.
The episode nevertheless points to a potentially important development ahead of Kenya’s 2027 elections.
Political campaigns have traditionally relied on rallies, advertising, influencers, party networks and social-media teams to shape public opinion. Generative AI can now add another layer, allowing operators to manufacture large volumes of politically aligned content with relatively little effort.
For politicians, the technology offers the potential to amplify messages. For political operators, it can provide a way to create the appearance of momentum. And for voters, it makes the distinction between authentic political engagement and synthetic online activity increasingly difficult to establish.
In Wandayi’s case, the reported use of Claude demonstrates how a prominent political figure can become the face of an AI-powered influence campaign without necessarily being its architect.
The bigger question for Kenya’s political ecosystem is whether AI will become a legitimate communications tool or an increasingly sophisticated mechanism for manufacturing political sentiment.
As the country moves toward the 2027 election, the battle for attention may increasingly be fought not only between politicians and parties, but also between real voices and machines capable of making artificial voices sound real.