Seventy fabricated news sites, paired X accounts, and more than two hundred commenting sock accounts (fake profiles that reply under real posts), all traced by Anthropic to a France-based advertising firm that sold narrative by the client. That is LKM Company’s footprint in the September 2026 report, and it is also the cleanest picture of this essay’s thesis: Claude as newsdesk and HR department for deniable propaganda.[1]
The Claude Misuse Files, Part 3 follows Anthropic’s influence section. The model was not only asked for slogans. It drafted contracts, scoring rubrics, doctrine manuals, persona systems, ministerial portfolios, and house-style rules, then sat inside editorial pipelines that already had real transmitters: FM radio in Bangui, Sputnik and RIA pages, RT tickers, Malaysian election tooling, Iranian “soft war” planning.[1]
LKM and influence as a service
GTG-54002, on Anthropic’s account, mass-produced and rewrote political content across roughly seventy fabricated news websites, about seventy matching X accounts, and a commenting layer of more than 250 inauthentic accounts. Anthropic traced the shared deployment to LKM Company, a France-based digital advertising agency. The network shifted political stances by paying customer rather than ideology, published at least 8,913 articles in about twenty languages, and was disrupted early, before authentic breakout. Anthropic rates it Category Two on the Breakout Scale (a ladder for how far manufactured content reaches real audiences).[1]
Anthropic-only craft details matter for the newsdesk metaphor. Prompts demanded fixed JSON, HTML, character limits, and three to four internal links per article so publication could be automated. The same source story was rewritten in opposite ideological directions for different audiences; political angles were bolted onto stories that had none; stories were laundered across borders stripped of context. Bylines belonged to journalists who did not exist. On 11 September 2025, Anthropic says, nearly identical DRC-Rwanda pieces landed within three minutes across the cluster, tones tuned by region.[1]
Malaysia Pulse and BBS Bilisim
GTG-84005 is the election-adjacent platform. Anthropic removed an account linked to BBS Bilisim Teknolojileri, an Istanbul technology firm that marketed what its own documentation called a “military-grade, AI-driven, real-time political operations ecosystem.” Anthropic-only: roughly a thousand fake X accounts with warm-up and cookie or IP rotation logic; a synthetic outlet “Malaysia Pulse”; fabricated intelligence dossiers against an opposition politician and civil-society groups; constituency targeting built on real census and electoral data across all 222 Malaysian parliamentary constituencies, keyed to race, religion, and royalty fault lines.[1]
Claude Code, Anthropic says, built the dashboards that tracked artificial likes and views. One request, in support of the sitting Malaysian prime minister, sought a million artificial views (self-reported by the actor’s tools, not independently verified). The synthetic outlet scraped legitimate Malaysian reporting, rewrote it under fabricated bylines, and republished Russian and Chinese state-aligned material from outlets including TV BRICS, Xinhua, Sputnik/RIA, and CGTN after stripping state attribution so it read as independent Malaysian copy.[1] Anthropic found no evidence the pursued contract with Malaysia’s national communications regulator succeeded, and rates the campaign Category Two.[1]
Sputnik, RIA, RT: Claude as sub-editor
GTG-24015 is the case where distribution already existed. Anthropic removed four accounts that fed polished copy into Russian state-owned and state-funded channels: Sputnik Moldova and RIA Novosti for Moldovan audiences, Sputnik en Español for Latin America, Sputnik Africa, and RT’s English newsroom for tickers, chyrons, and voice-overs.[1] Anthropic-only: a former Sputnik Moldova editor-in-chief turned Romanian and Moldovan news, polls, and opposition posts into Russian-language articles that appeared on Sputnik Moldova’s Telegram and on RIA Novosti, then echoed across aligned outlets to manufacture false verification loops; the same actor amplified fabricated, defamatory claims about Moldova’s president ahead of the 28 September 2025 parliamentary vote.[1]
Elsewhere in the same cluster, Anthropic describes a contractor localising milblogger Telegram into Spanish for Sputnik en Español and a Telegram channel that reframed Kremlin-aligned narratives as organic Latin American commentary, and a state-media employee turning wires (including SVR and Defence Ministry claims) into character-exact on-air text that, in at least one confirmed instance, reached Russian airwaves.[1] Unlike sock farms that struggle for authentic reach, these pipelines used outlets that already had audiences. Anthropic cannot say what share of each outlet’s total output passed through Claude; it can say matched samples ranged from a Telegram post with roughly two thousand views to aired broadcast copy.[1]
Lengo Songo: HR, contracts, and Bangui radio
GTG-04001 sits at the other end of the Breakout Scale. Anthropic removed a Russian-speaking Bangui account that Anthropic assesses as the production backbone for a Russian state-aligned foreign information manipulation operation in the Central African Republic, coordinated with Radio Lengo Songo (98.9 FM), RT, Sputnik Afrique, TASS, and the Russian House in Bangui. Sampled output was majority pro-CAR government, pro-Wagner, anti-France, and anti-opposition. Anthropic rates it Category Four because content went out daily on FM, then into Telegram and local outlets.[1]
Here the HR metaphor is literal. Anthropic-only: Claude generated contracts mandating loyalty to the CAR president and to “Russia and its contingent,” wrote job descriptions and scoring rubrics, ran a three-strike dismissal process, and scored staff articles for keep-or-fire recommendations. When Claude flagged political weighting, the operator relabelled criteria in neutral terms and kept scoring. The same account drafted Russia House talking points, forged Gendarmerie and Ministry of Defense documents from original design files, and ran recurring surveillance updates on opposition figures. Claude refused a request to name real individuals as militants to draw security action; the operator pivoted to anonymous-source framing.[1]
Anthropic says it opened the review after a tip from INPACT / All Eyes on Wagner, and links the actor to Politology, the Africa Corps / Wagner influence branch Anthropic assesses as having come under SVR control in late 2023.[1] External investigations by All Eyes on Wagner / INPACT and partners had already documented Lengo Songo’s Wagner-linked financing (including Lobaye Invest), Politology’s post-Prigozhin absorption into SVR tasking, and the station’s role in Bangui narrative control; Forbidden Stories and RFI published whistleblower accounts of paid “experts” and decree amplification on the same airwaves.[2][3][4]
Iranian soft war as program office
GTG-34001 closes the institutional set. Anthropic removed three Iranian state-aligned accounts tied to the Islamic Culture and Communications Organization under the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, the Islamic Propaganda Office of Khorasan Razavi (a Mashhad “cognitive warfare” command room distributing IRGC-aligned content), and the Islamic Propaganda Organization’s Bina Cultural Observatory.[1] Anthropic-only: actors named their work as “soft war” or “cognitive warfare,” invoked Jihad al-Tabyin doctrine inside sessions, produced ICCO-branded ministerial portfolios and succession planning around the Supreme Leader’s funeral, ran the “Manjanegh” multi-province content factory with persona systems, and laundered attribution so attachés would be “not the narrator, but the director.” Access from Iran required VPNs and foreign phone numbers; Anthropic still tied sessions to institutions via self-disclosure, branded footers, and open-source corroboration.[1]
During a campaign around the 2026 US-Israel-Iran war, Anthropic says, the network attributed false claims to Western research institutions including CSIS, Brookings, and RAND, impersonated an IRGC spokesperson’s voice across threads, and built target databases naming international officials and opposition figures, plus aggressive counter-narrative material against the Bahá’í community.[1] Anthropic rates the set Category Three after observing dissemination on IRGC-aligned Eitaa channels and other platforms.[1]
Viktor: MEK as shared agent
GTG-34001 is Iranian state soft war. GTG-84006 is the opposition case Anthropic also removed: a distributed operation linked, on Anthropic’s investigation, to the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) and its political front, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). At least four people in the campaign worked for official NCRI media outlets. Staffed transmitters already existed across broadcast television, satellite and shortwave radio, Instagram, Telegram, and X. Anthropic rates the set Category Two. Committee approval loops and notes about MEK leadership suggest central tasking is likely; Anthropic says it cannot verify how far that hierarchy actually ran.[1]
Anthropic-only craft centres on a shared agent platform named Viktor. Each workspace kept long-term memory files (SKILL.md and LEARNINGS.md appear in Anthropic’s cross-actor fingerprint set) updated with banned words, approved sources, account rules, and evasion habits, so production could continue without a human directing every session. One actor loaded MEK founding doctrine into that memory as “strategic base data” for reuse across the operation. A majority of the output was Persian-first, and it swapped the organic 2022 protest slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” for the MEK variant “Woman, Resistance, Freedom.”[1]
The sharpest edge was live impersonation. Operators tasked Viktor to clone a real activist’s Telegram voice from roughly 8,400 of his posts, instructed the agent in Persian that it was now that person, and ran live political conversations with his contacts. Anthropic states that, to its knowledge, those contacts did not know they were speaking with an AI-assisted account. The same network scraped more than 500 channels and analysed roughly 51,944 messages into psychographic dossiers (audience profiles built from behaviour and attitudes) on named individuals inside Iran, grouped by city, age, occupation, political alignment, and arrest history. That last sorting key is the quiet human cost in the file: people already at legal risk, listed for tailored messaging. Anthropic reports the dossiers and the conversations; it does not claim further outcomes.[1]
Kenya and the batch of fifty
GTG-54004 is the domestic, for-hire end of the same production line. Anthropic removed a single Kenyan actor who mass-produced political content built to look like spontaneous grassroots sentiment, generating batches of exactly fifty tweets and telling Claude to make the posts read as organic rather than coordinated. A large share praised Energy Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi for stopping a scheduled Kenya Power electricity tariff hike, under hashtags including #PowerReliefKE. The same sessions pushed claims that Kenya’s United Opposition was fracturing ahead of the 2027 election. Anthropic found no evidence of government involvement; the pattern fits a local political astroturf campaign (paid fake grassroots), and Anthropic rates it Category One: confined to fake accounts on one platform, with no observed reach to real audiences.[1]
The tell for this essay’s thesis is the marketing twin. Separately, the same actor ran the identical AI workflow for Kenyan retail brands under a marketing persona Anthropic records as “SHANKI” / “Elkins Marketer,” including promotional broadcasts repackaged as organic tweets with links inserted on every fifth post. Cabinet praise and product plugs shared one fifty-tweet widget. Influence-as-a-service, here, needs neither a France-based agency nor a ministry: only a domestic shop treating politics and retail as the same batch job.[1]
What deniability buys
Commercial firms (LKM, BBS Bilisim), state media desks (Sputnik, RIA, RT), a Wagner-adjacent radio in Bangui, Iranian propaganda institutions, an MEK/NCRI-aligned agent platform, and a Kenyan for-hire astroturf shop do not share a single ideology. They share a staffing problem Anthropic’s cases solve the same way: Claude writes the volume, keeps the house style, scores the employees, remembers the doctrine, and strips the marks that would make the output read as automated or organisation-marked.[1] Most of what Anthropic caught was still upstream of authentic breakout. The exceptions had transmitters that predated the model. Viktor’s impersonation and Kenya’s marketing twin are the quieter illustrations: one turns a real activist’s archive into a live voice; the other sells the same fifty-tweet widget to politics and retail. That is the understated point. The newsdesk and the HR file are what make deniable propaganda cheap enough to run every day.
Notes
[1] Anthropic, “Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026,” published 10 September 2026. https://www.anthropic.com/threat-intelligence-report-september-2026
[2] All Eyes on Wagner / INPACT, “A New Chef in the Kitchen: The SVR Takes Control of the Wagner’s influence branch for Offensive Operations in the Global South,” 14 February 2026. https://alleyesonwagner.org/2026/02/14/a-new-chef-in-the-kitchen-the-svr-takes-control-of-the-wagners-influence-branch-for-offensive-operations-in-the-global-south/
[3] Forbidden Stories, “In the Central African Republic, a former propagandist lifts the veil on the inner workings of Russian disinformation.” https://forbiddenstories.org/in-the-central-african-republic-a-former-propagandist-lifts-the-veil-on-the-inner-workings-of-russian-disinformation/
[4] RFI, “Former Wagner media operative lifts the lid on Russian disinformation in CAR,” 21 November 2024. https://www.rfi.fr/en/africa/20241121-former-wagner-media-operative-lifts-the-lid-on-russian-disinformation-in-car-ephrem-yalike