NAIROBI – A “mass surveillance” platform developed by a single Claude user and capable of monitoring 25 million SIMs in Mali, providing data and material to the coup junta in Bamako. It is one of the cases of “misuse” of artificial intelligence indicated by the industry giant Anthropic in a report documenting the activities identified and countered between November 2025 and August 2026.
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The investigation describes a total of nine different cases originating from Russia, Iran, and Turkey with impacts across the Gulf, South Asia, Africa, and Europe. The sub-Saharan region appears with the Malian case and another documented case near the Sahel: the removal of an account managed by “a Russian-speaking actor” in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, linked to an “Information Manipulation operation” in favor of Moscow.
Claude as “workforce” for Mali’s intelligence
According to Anthropic in its report, the Malian user exploited Claude as an “engineering workforce” to “develop a national interception and surveillance platform.” The system, renamed Lakana 360, “targeted” an audience of 25 million users distributed among three operators and provided material to the Agence Nationale de la Sécurité d’État, the state intelligence agency of Bamako.
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The platform allowed deep penetration into the data of the Sahelian country, collecting and filtering phone records, text messages, and voice calls, including “additional capture of voice traffic through Mali’s mobile networks.” The system, the report states, was coded with the explicit goal and premise of circumventing legal requirements for data disclosure. The Malian user trained Claude to “generate intelligence dossiers on any phone number under surveillance,” without requiring the presentation of an appropriate judicial order.
The Malian junta came to power with the double coup d’état between 2020 and 2021, following a wave of coups that swept Burkina Faso (2022), Niger (2023), and several other governments across West and Central Africa in the 2019-2023 period. The government has already faced several accusations of human rights violations and repression of political dissent, as well as controversies over its relationship with Russian contractors from the Africa Corps, the former Wagner private military company. Moscow is accused of information manipulation and digital propaganda activities, including those now contested and detected by the Anthropic report also in the case of the Central African Republic.
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