AI company says a UAE-directed operation used its chatbot to target the Brotherhood

Anthropic, the American AI company, said in its September threat intelligence report that it had detected and disrupted an influence operation it attributed to the United Arab Emirates, directed at the Muslim Brotherhood and at the war in Sudan. According to the report, a “single actor” used the company’s assistant, Claude, in what the document called a “coordinated transatlantic and regional operation to dismantle the Muslim Brotherhood globally.” The finding was reported on 11 September by Middle East Eye. Two things should be held apart. The existence of the report is a matter of corporate publication and is checkable. The attribution to Abu Dhabi is Anthropic’s own, relayed through an outlet that Emirati and Egyptian officials have for years accused of Brotherhood sympathy, and which is here reporting a story damaging to one of its accusers. The quoted phrases belong to the report, not to any named executive. No wire match and no response from the UAE government had surfaced at the time of writing.

The operation described sits alongside a state campaign that is a matter of public record. Executive Order 14362, signed on 24 November 2025, opened a process for designating Brotherhood chapters. On 13 January the State Department designated the Lebanese chapter as a foreign terrorist organisation and its leader Muhammad Fawzi Taqqosh as a specially designated global terrorist, while Treasury designated the Egyptian and Jordanian branches under Executive Order 13224. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it “a first step” and “the opening actions of an ongoing, sustained effort.” Sudan’s branch followed on 9 March. One detail in Treasury’s January release cuts against the prevailing framing: it alleges that in mid-2025 leaders of Hamas’s military wing “worked with the EMB to undermine and destabilize the Egyptian government, accepting Hamas funding to do so.” The money, in Washington’s own account, ran from Hamas to the Brotherhood, not the other way.

Assessment: The interesting thing here is not the campaign but the attributor. Influence operations against the Brotherhood have been assumed for a decade; what is new is that the entity naming a state sponsor is a private American software vendor with commercial reasons to publicise its own detection capability, and no obligation to show evidence. Governments that would once have made or withheld such an attribution now learn of it from a product safety report. Distrust the chain in both directions: Anthropic has not been independently checked, and Middle East Eye is not a neutral conduit. Abu Dhabi’s silence eight days on is the variable worth watching.