Malaysia Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim is about to do something very few heads of government have done: send an artificial intelligence (AI) version of himself out to meet the public, Bloomberg reported.

According to the report, the avatar has been built by Malaysian digital infrastructure firm Zetrix AI Bhd and is called PMX AI, a nod to Anwar’s place as the country’s 10th prime minister. It is expected to make its debut within days, according to the Prime Minister’s Office.

PMX AI has been trained on Anwar’s own writings, speeches, and the record of his government’s policies, so that when it speaks, it looks and sounds unmistakably like him. It is an intiative by Anwar’s political party, PKR.

“AI will transform governance and politics,” Zetrix group managing director TS Wong said in the report.

An AI avatar is, at its simplest, a digital stand-in for a real person, capable of holding conversations with users. What sets this one apart is its autonomy. Engineers built it to be agentic, meaning it can take a task, break it into steps, and carry it out largely on its own without a human checking in at every turn, the report added.

According to Wong, Zetrix has developed what it calls a “personal knowledge” model – an AI system that is fed continuously with the prime minister’s recent speeches and remarks, which helps to sharpen its responses in real time into something closer to a genuine likeness.

The PMO has produced a launch video to introduce it, the report said.

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