This article is concerned with the event‐triggered nonfragile reliable control of nonlinear positive semi‐Markovian jump systems with randomly occurring faults. The randomly occurring actuator fault, describing the phenomenon of the actuator fault appearing in a random way, is assumed to obey a semi‐Markovian process different from the jump process of the systems. The nonlinear function is located in a sector. Using a stochastic copositive Lyapunov function integrated with linear programming, an event‐triggered control strategy is employed to deal with the stochastic stabilization of the underlying systems, where the transition rates satisfy a polytopic uncertain condition. Nonfragile reliable controllers with additive and multiplicative perturbations are proposed for the considered systems, respectively. Compared with existing results, the obtained approach establishes a more general fault description and proposes a more practicable control design. Finally, the novelties of the proposed approach are verified via two examples.