Malaysia's Anwar to deploy PMX AI, an avatar trained on his own speeches

Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim is launching an AI avatar of himself called PMX AI that renews licenses, processes payments and answers questions in his voice. 

Anwar will become among the first sitting national leaders to hand over routine public jobs to an artificial likeness. 

Malaysia welcomes new AI Prime Minister

In Malaysia’s quest to rebrand itself as a regional AI hub before its election due by early 2028, the country’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim is rolling out an artificial version of himself built by Zetrix AI Bhd, a Malaysian digital infrastructure firm. 

The firm was started by Anwar’s own party, Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR). The AI likeness, named PMX AI, points to Anwar’s standing as the country’s 10th prime minister. The Prime Minister’s Office says the launch is expected within days.

Zetrix describes PMX AI as “agentic,” meaning it can accept tasks and then execute them with little human oversight. 

In practice, a citizen could ask the avatar to renew a driver’s license, receive a payment link, and get confirmation the transaction cleared, all inside one conversation rather than across separate portals or counters.

To keep the likeness convincing, Zetrix feeds the model what it calls a “personal knowledge” system that is updated continuously with Anwar’s latest speeches and remarks. The avatar has been trained on his writings and his government’s policy record. 

It can hold conversations in both English and Malay, but also recognizes regional dialects and local slang. 

The Prime Minister’s Office released a flashy promotional launch video, in which Anwar is cast as an astronaut, while a disembodied voice narrates that the avatar is a digital extension of him that is “ready to listen, assist and serve the people.”

What are the political goals behind launching an AI Prime Minister?

With an election looming, Anwar is attempting to attract younger voters. He wants to be seen as a leader fluent in AI, digital investment and higher-value jobs. Launching the avatar aligns with that plan. It also fits a wider agenda that includes Malaysia Digital 2030, a national plan Anwar unveiled on June 29 that involves having the digital economy contribute 30% of GDP by the end of the decade.

Anwar recently shared that the government is finalizing an AI Governance Bill to sit alongside the Cybersecurity Act and existing data protection law. He has also repeatedly urged the country to prepare its workforce for the AI era.

Critics have pointed out that a synthetic prime minister blurs the line between public administration, party messaging and Anwar’s personal branding. 

Adding to that, citizens may trust an answer more when it appears to come from the head of government himself, but AI systems can still give wrong answers or have missing information in their training data. Attaching a leader’s face raises the stakes for those kinds of mistakes. 

However, Malaysia is not the first country to have artificial versions of members of government. Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky has appeared in AI-generated multilingual messages, India’s Narendra Modi has used AI to speak in several Indian languages, and South Korea’s President Lee Jae Myung relied on an AI avatar to field voter questions during his campaign.

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