Elections

Anthropic report: commercial influence-as-a-service operation published 8,913 articles in ~20 languages across 70 fake news sites harmful

• GTG-54002, which Anthropic attributes to a France-based firm it calls LKM Company, ran "approximately 70 fabricated news websites," 70 matching X/Twitter accounts and more than 250 inauthentic commenting accounts, and "published at least 8,913 articles in about 20 languages" across six continents, with the United States, Brazil, France and the Democratic Republic of Congo among the targets.
• A separate cluster, GTG-84005, attributed to Istanbul-based BBS Bilisim Teknolojileri, managed "roughly a thousand fake X/Twitter social media accounts" and profiled voters across "all 222 Malaysian parliamentary constituencies" using census and electoral data, exploiting race, religion and royalty as wedge issues.
• What is new here is the business model: manipulation sold as a commercial service to clients, rather than run in-house by a state. Anthropic rates both operations Category Two on the Breakout Scale — meaning no measured spread beyond the operations' own platforms — so reach should not be inferred from article counts.
• The article and account totals are Anthropic's counts of activity on its platform, not an independent audit of the networks.