SOMETIMES, the most important point in a story gets buried deep in the news. A case in hand is the news that Anthropic, the AI firm, had “disrupted” a “military-grade” operations based in a foreign city to manipulate, dictate and mess up Malaysia’s politics and voters.
Anthropic may not know (yet) who is behind this operations but it knows who are NOT and that is, I think, the most important part of the news, at least for now.
Yes, Anthropic actually did say in its report that it found NO EVIDENCE linking the ops to Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim or the Prime Minister’s Office.
In other words, somebody else or someone else’s office is behind this attack on Malaysia and I am sure it is not the Turks although the operation that Anthropic claimed to have disrupted was based in Istanbul.
I think the fact that PMX and PMO are not behind this campaign should be in the headlines, not buried deep in our own news reports.
Well, I know for a fact that MCMC is taking the Anthropic report “very seriously”.
This is one of the reasons why the communication and multimedia commission was formed, to safeguard the sovereignty of our cyberspace and the security of its users and dependents, which is basically the whole population.
The operation allegedly extended beyond social media, according to some news reports, with Anthropic claiming that it involved a fabricated news website called Malaysia Pulse, which used AI tools to scrape legitimate Malaysian news reports, rewrite them and publish the material under fake bylines.
The site also republished content from Chinese and Russian state-aligned outlets, including Xinhua, CGTN, Sputnik/RIA and TV BRICS.
Antrophic said it detected and removed the Claude account involved in the operation after an internal investigation, while using the information gathered to map the wider network and disrupt similar misuse.
Anthropic also said its findings covered activities it disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026, including cyber operations, influence campaigns, surveillance, scams and fraud.
The company did not disclose who commissioned the Malaysia-focused operation, whether it was linked to any election, or when exactly the activity took place.
Last week, incidentally, and this is not the most important thing in this story, which is why I am burying it deep in this posting, I was interviewed by the cops on a police report lodged earlier this year against a foreign news agency believed to have been engaged by one of the country’s richest and powerful names.
The foreign news agency was supposed to have been engaged to churn out a series of news reports that would discredit the PMX and his then chief commissioner of the MACC, the national anti-graft body. Several people have been interviewed in this ongoing probe, I was told, including members of the family concerned.
From experience, I have come to know that a lot of Malaysians tend to be skeptical whenever one party lodges such a report with the police but perhaps the Anthropic’s developing scandal will make them think again, that maybe in this day and age, where we have easy access to Information Technology tools without being really informed ourselves, scamming people, instigating voters, and undermining governments have become child’s play, easier than ever.
And then there’s the claim by Hadi Awang, the head of PAS, on how the Americans (CIA?) offered to help the Islamist party to overthrow the Malaysian government not too long ago, an accusation that the US Embassy in KL has, of course, denied but in view of this latest explosive scandal involving Anthropic, the question to ask is not why would Hadi make up a story like that? But why would Hadi make up such a story? – September 12, 2026
Datuk Ahirudin Attan, better known as Rocky Bru, is executive director at Big Boom Media which publishes Scoop.