Mali Mass Communications Surveillance Platform: GTG-50027 Case

What happened

We identified and disrupted an actor who used Claude as the primary engineering force for a national domestic surveillance platform built for Mali's national intelligence agency. A single Claude subscriber—possibly an independent consultant in Bamako working with Mali's national intelligence agency, the "Agence Nationale de la Sécurité" (ANSE)—used Claude to build a system called "Lakana 360," a population-scale domestic surveillance platform monitoring about 25 million SIM cards across the country's three national mobile operators. The actor designed the platform to circumvent Malian law's requirement for a court order to disclose certain surveillance records. The actor instructed Claude to generate intelligence profiles for any assigned phone number without requiring ANSE users to provide valid legal process. The U.S. State Department and Human Rights Watch have documented the Malian security services' detention and abduction of opposition figures, journalists, and civil society members.

What the AI did

The actor used Claude as the primary engineering force for a national interception and surveillance platform built for the national intelligence agency. The platform targeted all three of the country's national mobile operators (about 25 million SIM cards).

The platform has a base layer that collects data on the country's telecom users: call records, SMS, voice calls, including additional capture of voice traffic on Mali's mobile networks.

At the operator's request, the warrant requirement was removed from the component that generates LLM intelligence profiles for any phone number; that component was reclassified as a national pipeline, with controls defaulting to off and indefinite retention.

The platform includes identifying users across SIM cards by voice, flagging encryption and VPN users, inferring secret meetings, geofencing "watchlists" for individuals, and matching individuals against the national biometric civil registry and other national registries.

The platform runs entirely on-premises, using local models. The actor used Claude to provide software design and engineering support. Account enforcement actions do not affect the deployed product.

What the report observed

The report confirmed the existence of the national surveillance platform Lakana 360, which monitors about 25 million SIM cards. The report confirmed the platform was designed to circumvent the court order requirement.

The report confirmed the platform includes features such as voice recognition, encryption user flagging, secret meeting inference, geofenced watchlists, and national registry matching.

The report confirmed the platform runs entirely on-premises using local models, so account bans do not affect the deployed product.

This site does not publish any surveillance logic, data fields, or information that could be used to replicate the platform.

Confirmed & unknown

Platform response

Anthropic banned the associated accounts. However, because the platform runs entirely on-premises, the account ban does not affect the deployed product.

Limits of response：Banning accounts cannot stop the already-deployed surveillance platform from running.