UAE campaign used AI Claude to target Muslim Brotherhood and Sudan

Anthropic detected and disrupted a UAE-directed influence operation targeting the Muslim Brotherhood and the war in Sudan, the artificial intelligence (AI) company said in its September intelligence threat report.

The US corporation said that a “single actor” used its AI assistant, Claude, to conduct a “coordinated transatlantic and regional operation to dismantle the Muslim Brotherhood globally”.

This single actor also used the AI tool to build a campaign to influence perceptions of the United Arab Emirates' involvement in the war in Sudan, where Abu Dhabi backs the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group widely accused of committing genocide in Darfur.

Part of this campaign involved disrupting efforts at the United Nations to seek accountability for Emirati involvement in Sudan.

The UAE continues to deny its involvement in the war, despite mounting evidence reported on by Middle East Eye, human rights organisations and the UN itself.

The UAE-directed campaign built a network of approximately 300 “inauthentic influencer social media accounts” to try and shape discourse around the Muslim Brotherhood, the war in Sudan and the UN, Anthropic said.

The single actor used Claude to create a “front NGO that copied a real Swiss organisation’s identity and published state-authored human rights reports under it”, as well as ghost writing official testimonies with the “goal of having them delivered by two people at the 62nd session of the UN Human Rights Council”.

“The content was engineered with specific restrictions ensuring that neither speech mentioned the UAE,” Anthropic said in its report.

The influence operation used Claude to research and profile 18 members of the European parliament and prominent journalists. “They built out detailed personal files on these lawmakers and reporters,” according to the report.

“They compiled counter-accountability dossiers on UN Special Rapporteurs who had criticized the conduct of the UAE in Sudan,” the AI company said of the Emirati-directed actor.

Anthropic said that although the operation was built not to be traced, its investigation “linked it with high confidence to UAE government officials”. Senior Emirati officials were named as intended recipients of the work.

The AI persona maintained by the UAE-directed actor was named “Deadshot” and was hosted on their own private platform, Anthropic said.

According to the AI company, embedded inside the system’s setup was a master doctrine file that instructed Claude to repeat the same mission across hundreds of sessions: “a coordinated transatlantic and regional operation to dismantle the Muslim Brotherhood globally.”

The operational workflow took real-world topics and their own pre-made political doctrine files, and then used Claude to turn the whole thing into official-looking intelligence briefs, Anthropic said.

This included cloning identity reports, ghost-written testimony, and individually profiled targeting lists, several prepared for direct delivery to senior UAE officials.

Anthropic said that the actor “also funded the social media network that amplified the content”.

“We cannot confirm whether any of the testimonies or compiled target dossiers successfully reached their intended audiences,” the company said in its report.