作者： admin

Leading artificial intelligence firm Anthropic has announced the discovery and disruption of a coordinated, UAE-directed influence operation that exploited its Claude AI assistant to shape global discourse on two high-stakes regional issues: the status of the Muslim Brotherhood and the ongoing conflict in Sudan. The details of this covert campaign are laid out in the company’s September 2024 intelligence threat report, marking one of the first documented cases of a state-aligned actor abusing commercial generative AI to advance covert geopolitical goals.

According to Anthropic’s investigation, the operation was run by a single actor working on behalf of United Arab Emirates government officials, with high confidence linking the work to senior Emirati decision-makers. The core mission laid out in the operation’s internal guiding documents, which the actor fed directly into Claude across hundreds of work sessions, was to execute a coordinated transatlantic and regional campaign aimed at dismantling the global Muslim Brotherhood movement. Beyond that, the operation also sought to manipulate global public opinion regarding the UAE’s well-documented involvement in Sudan’s two-year civil war.

The UAE has publicly long denied any role in the Sudan conflict, but multiple independent investigations from Middle East Eye, international human rights groups, and United Nations researchers have confirmed that Abu Dhabi provides extensive military and political backing to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the Sudanese paramilitary group that has been widely accused of perpetrating genocide and mass atrocities in the Darfur region. The influence operation’s secondary goal was specifically designed to undermine international efforts to hold the UAE accountable for its support for the RSF at the UN.

To carry out this campaign, the actor leveraged Claude’s generative capabilities to build an extensive infrastructure of deceptive content and networks. At its core, the operation built a network of roughly 300 inauthentic influencer accounts across major social media platforms, all designed to amplify the operation’s narratives to broader audiences. The actor also used Claude to create a fake non-governmental organization that stole the identity of a legitimate, existing Swiss human rights group, publishing state-aligned “human rights reports” under the stolen organization’s legitimacy.

One of the operation’s most high-stakes plans targeted the UN Human Rights Council’s 62nd session. Claude was used to ghost-write official testimonies that were intended to be delivered by two speakers at the session, with explicit instructions built into the content that the UAE could not be mentioned in any critical context. Beyond institutional targeting, the actor used Claude to conduct open-source research and build detailed personal profiles of 18 members of the European Parliament and prominent international journalists who cover Middle East affairs. The operation also compiled dedicated counter-accountability dossiers targeting UN Special Rapporteurs who had previously published criticism of the UAE’s conduct in Sudan. All of the generated content, from cloned identity documents to profiled target lists, was prepared for direct delivery to senior UAE government officials, Anthropic confirmed.

The actor operated a custom private AI persona codenamed “Deadshot” on their own private infrastructure to coordinate the campaign, embedding a master mission file that instructed Claude to reiterate the operation’s core goals across all work sessions. The standardized workflow mixed real-world event data and the actor’s pre-written political doctrine, then used Claude to refine the content into official-looking intelligence reports, testimonies, and dossiers. The UAE-linked actor also directly funded the social media network created to amplify the operation’s content to wider global audiences.

To date, Anthropic notes that it has not been able to confirm whether any of the prepared testimonies or compiled targeting dossiers successfully reached their intended audiences at the UN or within the UAE government. The UAE has not yet issued a public response to Anthropic’s findings, and continues to maintain its official position that it has no involvement in the Sudan conflict. The disclosure shines a new light on the growing risk of state actors misusing commercial generative AI tools to conduct covert geopolitical influence operations, undermining multilateral accountability efforts and manipulating global public discourse.

In a significant clarification of its new Middle East policy, the British government has confirmed that its sweeping sanctions targeting illegal Israeli settlements will cover communities in the occupied Golan Heights and East Jerusalem, in addition to those in the occupied West Bank, multiple government sources confirmed to Middle East Eye Thursday evening.

The announcement comes two days after London formally declared Israel’s long-running occupation of Palestinian territory illegal and unveiled the landmark package of restrictions, but left open a key ambiguity: whether settlements in the Golan Heights, a strategic plateau seized by Israel from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War, would be included in the measures. The lack of initial clarity prompted advocacy groups focused on international law to push for the UK to extend the ban to all illegally occupied territory.

Located at the intersection of Israel, Syria and southern Lebanon, the Golan Heights holds enormous strategic significance, with high elevation that allows forces stationed there to monitor activity across much of the northern Middle East. Israel captured the territory in 1967 and unilaterally annexed it just a few years later, a move that has never received formal recognition from the broader international community. United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, adopted in the wake of the 1967 war, explicitly calls on Israel to withdraw from the Golan Heights and all other occupied territories captured during the conflict, including the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Today, roughly 20,000 Israeli settlers reside in the Golan, alongside an estimated 26,000 native Syrian Druze inhabitants who retain their Syrian national identity.

UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband laid out the scope of the new policy when he announced it earlier this week, stating that the British public does not support enabling illegal occupation by allowing settlement-produced goods to be sold in UK retail spaces. “I do not believe the British people want us supporting the occupation by accepting products from settlements in our shops and supermarkets, so I can announce today that we will introduce an import ban on goods from illegal settlements in the occupied territories,” Miliband said Tuesday.

The new framework will operate as a comprehensive sanctions regime, with narrow carve-outs for religious activities that require cross-border access. Beyond the import ban on settlement goods, the UK will target specific companies and private individuals that provide key support for settlement expansion, including construction services, infrastructure financing, and real estate development for new settlement communities. “To those who finance or facilitate illegal settlements, let me say this: you will face the full force of UK sanctions,” Miliband added. “Settlements are illegal. They should not be promoted in our country.”

The UK’s policy shift is not an isolated action: 11 other nations, including Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, joined London in a joint statement released Tuesday. The signatory countries confirmed they intend to implement their own national restrictions on trade with illegal settlements, support broader European Union-level trade restrictions, or are actively evaluating such measures in line with their own domestic legislative and regulatory processes.

Israel has already responded with punitive measures of its own. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar announced that Israel would implement reciprocal sanctions, including closing the British consulate in East Jerusalem and banning entry to 11 sitting British members of parliament.

Positioned directly across the Bab el-Mandeb Strait from Yemen, Eritrea—an East African nation with 700 miles of strategic Red Sea coastline—has publicly stated that the years-long conflict in Yemen can never be resolved through military means, and that no foreign power will ever succeed in bringing the Yemeni people under control.

In an exclusive interview with Middle East Eye conducted from Eritrea’s capital Asmara, Eritrean Foreign Minister Osman Saleh emphasized that Yemen must be given an opportunity to build lasting peace, noting that military action will not deliver the stability the region desperately needs.

Saleh’s comments come amid a dramatic shift in regional power dynamics: a rapid, sweeping Houthi offensive along Yemen’s Red Sea coast has left the group in full control of all Yemeni coastal territory opposite Eritrea and Djibouti, including a number of strategically vital islands in the strait. This territorial gain has upended long-standing calculations around Red Sea navigation and regional security.

One of the most pressing open questions for global trade and regional governance centers on how freedom of navigation through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait—one of the world’s most critical maritime chokepoints, connecting the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean via the Red Sea—will be managed moving forward. Saleh noted that all coastal states bordering the waterway should have a voice in determining its future governance, but that the current fragmented political landscape in Yemen creates a major barrier to collective action. Today, Yemen lacks a single cohesive, unified central government that can exercise full control over its territory, a reality Saleh made clear complicates every decision related to the strait. “Yemen is non-existent. The official government has no control. There is no ‘Yemen’,” he told MEE in the interview.

The Bab el-Mandeb Strait has been a major global shipping and trade route for millennia, and it remains one of the most heavily used maritime corridors for global commerce today. With that strategic importance comes intense global interest, and Eritrea — which sits just 20 nautical miles from Yemen at the strait’s narrowest point alongside Djibouti — recognizes its unique responsibility, Saleh said. “Eritrea is in a very strategic position. We have a responsibility to safeguard the Red Sea to be a safe passage for all,” he stated.

Regional diplomats have outlined two core strategic implications of the Houthi advance: First, control of the strait gives Iran greater diplomatic and military leverage over the United States and Gulf Arab states. Second, the territorial gain puts commercial transiting vessels within range of basic Houthi artillery, putting the group in a position to demand tolls for passage through the waterway. Prior to the offensive, MEE reporting indicates the Houthis already demanded fees from Saudi Arabia for transit.

With the Houthis now controlling the Arabian Peninsula side of the strait, Eritrea’s Red Sea coastline has grown even more critical to global shipping networks. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), coastal nations can claim up to 12 nautical miles of territorial water, and while international law enshrines the right of free transit through international straits, some legal experts note that littoral states retain the right to charge legitimate fees for services like pilotage, infrastructure maintenance, and environmental protection.

When asked whether Eritrea planned to follow recent discussions of transit tolls in other strategic waterways like the Strait of Hormuz, Saleh pushed back on assumptions. “This is a new idea, a new concept. Because Iran raised it [in the Strait of Hormuz] doesn’t mean Eritrea will ask,” he said. That said, Saleh reaffirmed the need for collective dialogue between all coastal states to formalize rules that protect free passage for all vessels. “[But] there should be a discussion among littoral states and a decision how to ensure free passage. If Yemen is non-existent, we can’t speak with it now about these issues,” he added.

Another senior Eritrean official, who spoke to MEE on condition of anonymity, echoed the foreign ministry’s stance on Yemen and expanded on Eritrea’s view of broader regional tensions. The official noted that Eritrea understands the security of the Red Sea is inherently tied to the ongoing escalating confrontation between the United States, Israel and Iran. “The Bab el-Mandeb and Strait of Hormuz are together,” the official said, framing the two strategic chokepoints as interconnected nodes in a single regional security architecture. Echoing Saleh’s comments on foreign intervention, the official added that no external power—whether from inside the Middle East or beyond—will ever be able to subdue the Yemeni people through military force.