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A China-aligned operator used Claude, Anthropic’s generative AI assistant, to track Uyghurs living in Syria and recruit potential informants within the community. The model translated messages, facilitated communication in local dialects, and geolocated people, zeroing in on particularly vulnerable individuals who face financial hardship or separation from family members still in Xinjiang, the autonomous region in northwest China that is home to the majority of the Uyghur population. Claude helped the operators turn scattered digital traces into targeted intelligence, amplifying the reach of China’s surveillance of a persecuted ethnic minority.
The case is one of several examples of AI-enabled digital transnational repression detailed in a recent report by Anthropic’s Threat Intelligence team, published on Sept. 10, 2026. The report gives direct evidence that generative AI is being incorporated into the machinery of cross-border repression, enabling authoritarian governments and their proxies to build scalable workflows for identifying, monitoring, and targeting diaspora activists and exiled dissidents around the world.
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Because these operations target people across jurisdictions and can enable offline coercion, AI companies should treat transnational repression as a distinct threat category, separate from domestic surveillance and influence operations. Frontier AI companies—those building highly capable, general-purpose AI models—should follow Anthropic’s lead and publish detailed reports that specifically track incidents of digital transnational repression. They should also establish protocols for detecting digital transnational repression, publicly notifying affected communities, and preserving evidence captured in the course of their threat investigations. Taking these steps would help curb the misuse of American technology by repressive governments reaching across borders and improve protections for the already vulnerable groups they are threatening.
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First, Anthropic’s report demonstrates how AI lowers operational costs, making repression more accessible. Operations of digital repression have usually depended on language skills, trained intelligence analysts, and software engineers. The cases in the report suggest that AI can substitute for parts of this expertise. In the campaign against Uyghurs in Syria, operators used Claude to profile targets according to their vulnerabilities and craft a recruitment script in Syrian dialect, despite not speaking Arabic themselves. In the case of three state-backed Iranian influence operations, the actors relied on the model to develop complex campaign plans, operation manuals, and persona systems, working in several languages to promote regime narratives and target, among others, the persecuted Baha’i religious minority and Iranian opposition figures at home and abroad.
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Second, AI models are being used to convert digital traces into detailed information that can be used to track specific targets. Diaspora communities generate large amounts of publicly accessible data across social media, messaging platforms, public databases, and organizational websites. AI assistants can take this fragmented data and structure it into detailed intelligence reports. These reports can reconstruct social networks and relations, infer political affiliations, pinpoint locations, and even flag vulnerabilities.
In one case, a commercial intelligence vendor likely working for Arabic-speaking customers in the Gulf region created a platform to analyze the social media activity of diaspora users, mapping their location and categorizing them as pro-government or opposition. Anthropic disrupted this operation before it was deployed.
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Third, Claude is being integrated into standardized workflows that repeatedly collect information about targets across borders. Repressive operators rely on models to build entire surveillance systems and supporting infrastructure, allowing small teams of human operators to oversee recurring, partly automated surveillance reports. In one instance, a Chinese security contractor used Claude to produce daily “public opinion” briefings for government officials that “catalogued dissidents, activists, ethnic minority and Chinese diaspora communities, and foreign media as threats to political stability.” The operator also created a system that enabled the automated review of 15-30 or more foreign media articles per day. The resulting briefings included recommendations for government enforcement action, turning the monitoring of overseas communities into a routine bureaucratic process.
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the report substantiates that AI-enabled surveillance can lead to real-world acts of transnational repression. The technology produces information that can support physical surveillance, coercion, informant recruitment, the deployment of agents, and the disruption of civil society activities. For instance, in the campaign targeting Uyghurs in Syria, the operators used Claude to identify targets’ physical locations and family members that could be used as leverage. Other operations used AI to conduct reconnaissance of the physical spaces where diaspora communities organize. In one China-affiliated operation against religious minorities, Claude helped compile actionable surveillance files, including “floor plans, facades, and structural diagrams” of religious venues. In another, a China-affiliated actor researched a protest route in Vancouver, Uyghur events in Turkey, and the Oslo Freedom Forum. Although the report does not establish that this reconnaissance led to physical attacks, the cases show how AI-assisted analysis can support authorities to monitor, intimidate, and threaten activists beyond their borders.
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