The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) originated as an online post. Since then, it’s been looking to turn a viral meme into a movement, an evolutionary push that has AI written all over it. From the besuited cockroaches to the quirky posts, the use of AI is unmissable. Security and policy researchers said such online political activity is bound to increase.
They said 2026 marked the first year of grand-scale AI adoption in political management, the results of which will likely be visible in 2027 and beyond. “Everyone’s online, everyone has access to AI tools and if right now people are vibe coding $100 million companies, why can’t we be vibe coding political movements?” said Sudhanshu Kaushik, president and CEO of the Centre for Youth Policy.
“We’ve been dealing with bot accounts since social media started and before that we had other ways of manufacturing movements. Even the origin of the Cockroach Janta Party is based on AI. The original website is also very AI slop. You’re going to have movements like this pop up all the time to reflect people’s identity issues.”
Experts said advanced AI agents can now act as “swarms,” autonomously adapting to human interaction to simulate authentic grassroots movements. While individual deepfakes rarely change voter minds, this technology drastically lowers the cost of manufacturing public consensus. By deploying hybrid networks of AI and real influencers, malicious actors can easily exploit platform algorithms, experts said.
“In general, AI-generated content today lowers the cost of building a politicallooking movement,” said Lukasz Olejnik, visiting senior research fellow at the department of war studies at King’s College London and author of Propaganda. “It can generate logos, slogans, videos, text content, audio content, including multilingual posts, synthetic personas, and tailored narratives. Everything moves at a pace and speed that previously required building with humans.”
He said the key analytical test is whether the campaign creates sentiment organically or merely reprocesses and accelerates existing sentiment. He added that bots will not disappear as they are necessary for distribution, engagement inflation, search manipulation and coordinated visibility but that they will increasingly be powered by AI agents.
