Malaysia’s PM is sending an autonomous AI double out to serve citizens, payment links and all

Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim is launching an autonomous AI avatar, PMX AI, built by Zetrix AI Bhd., to help citizens with tasks like renewing driving licenses and providing career advice. The agentic system, trained on Anwar's speeches and writings, can process requests and send payment links with minimal human oversight, ahead of a national election by 2028. The move raises concerns about AI-driven political tools and election disinformation.

Malaysia’s prime minister is trying something new: sending an autonomous copy of himself out to serve the public. Anwar Ibrahim is preparing to launch an artificial intelligence version of himself. The avatar is called PMX AI, a nod to his place as Malaysia’s tenth prime minister. Bloomberg reports https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-10/malaysia-s-anwar-to-debut-an-ai-double-that-sounds-just-like-him it could go live within days. A Malaysian digital infrastructure firm, Zetrix AI Bhd., built the double and trained it on Anwar’s own writings, speeches and government record. The idea is that it looks and sounds unmistakably like him. It is a project of his party, Parti Keadilan Rakyat, launched ahead of a national election that must happen by early 2028. Not just a talking head Plenty of politicians have posted AI clips of themselves. What sets PMX AI apart is that it is built to act, not only to speak. Engineers made it agentic, which means it can take a request, break it into steps and carry it out with little human oversight. In practice, that looks strikingly like a government counter. The avatar is meant to help a citizen renew a driving licence. Then it sends a payment link and confirms the transaction. It converses in English and Malay, and it follows regional dialects and Malay slang. It is pitched as a careers adviser too. The system is meant to steer people toward training schemes and job placements, and to suggest courses to students based on their interests. “AI will transform governance and politics,” said TS Wong, Zetrix’s group managing director. The company says it feeds the model a steady stream of Anwar’s recent remarks, sharpening the likeness in close to real time. A superhero, an astronaut, and Neo The launch video makes the ambition plain, and a little strange. “It is a digital extension of myself. Ready to listen, assist and serve the people,” the narration says, in Anwar’s voice. The visuals cast him as an astronaut, a caped superhero, and a character who looks a lot like Neo from The Matrix. The timing is not subtle. Anwar wants to look like a leader at ease with AI and digital investment, and he needs the support of younger voters. An avatar that never sleeps, and never strays off-message, is a useful campaign asset. Malaysia is not first, but it is going further Other leaders have put their faces on AI already. Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy has appeared in AI-generated multilingual messages. India’s Narendra Modi has used AI https://thenextweb.com/news/macron-modi-ai-infrastructure-personal-diplomacy to address audiences in several Indian languages. South Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, ran an AI avatar during his campaign that answered voters’ questions directly. What Malaysia adds is autonomy: an avatar that does not just talk, but does things. Where it gets uncomfortable An agentic stand-in for a head of government raises obvious questions. The same system that can push a payment link could, after a bad update or a breach, push something else. As AI avatars grow more capable https://thenextweb.com/news/interactive-avatar-models-three-levels-interactivity , the line between a helpful public service and a persuasive political tool gets thinner. Regulators have started drawing that line. France is moving to triple the penalties for AI-driven election disinformation https://thenextweb.com/news/france-plans-to-triple-penalties-for-ai-driven-election-disinformation , and China has begun reining in lifelike AI agents https://thenextweb.com/news/china-humanlike-ai-agent-rules . Detection is racing to catch up, with Google’s SynthID watermark https://thenextweb.com/news/google-synthid-mcconnell-deepfake-debunked among the first tools to flag a political deepfake in the wild. Malaysia is betting that voters will read PMX AI as convenience, not spin. Anwar’s team is confident the avatar will help people navigate a slow bureaucracy. The harder question is whether citizens will always know, or care, that the prime minister answering them is a machine. Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.