Imagine scrolling through X and suddenly seeing dozens of Kenyan voices praising Cabinet Secretary for Energy Opiyo Wandayi for stopping a scheduled electricity tariff increase. Hashtags like #PowerReliefKE and #PoweringTheNewKenya are everywhere. It feels like a spontaneous wave of public relief — ordinary citizens, happy about lower bills, grateful for a politician who listened. But the artificial intelligence company Anthropic has revealed a very different story. Behind that wave was not a movement but a machine: a single person using Anthropic’s Claude chatbot to mass-produce fake political posts, in batches of exactly 50 tweets, designed to look like organic grassroots…

When the chief executive of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution stepped forward to say that volunteers are facing “unacceptable” abuse, the words carried the weight of more than two centuries of maritime rescue history. The RNLI, after all, is not some faceless government agency or corporate machine. It is a patchwork of ordinary people—fishermen, shopkeepers, retired teachers, office workers, students—who leave their warm beds at 3 a.m. when the pager goes off, pull on waterproof overalls, and race across rain-slicked roads to launch a lifeboat into a violent sea. For generations, these volunteers have been treated as quiet heroes, the…