Posting on Grok.com 29 December 2025
Question put to Grok.com:
latest news on Shell Donovan feud
Grok Reply
The “Shell Donovan feud” (more accurately, the Donovan-Shell feud) refers to a long-running, decades-old conflict between John Donovan (a British entrepreneur and activist) and Royal Dutch Shell (now Shell plc), the global oil giant.
Background of the Feud
It dates back to the 1990s, when John Donovan (along with his late father, Alfred Donovan) ran a company called Don Marketing. They specialized in creating promotional games for oil companies. Donovan alleges that Shell repeatedly stole intellectual property ideas from his firm (including popular games like “Make Money”), leading to failed negotiations, lawsuits, and a public campaign to expose what he describes as Shell’s unethical behavior. The dispute has involved multiple court cases (including a notable 1999 High Court trial), domain name battles (which Donovan won in some instances), and extensive archiving of documents, leaks, and media coverage on his watchdog site royaldutchshellplc.com.
Donovan has published books on the topic, such as “John Donovan, Shell’s Nightmare: My Epic Feud with the Unscrupulous Oil Giant Royal Dutch Shell”, and positions himself as a persistent shareholder activist and critic of Shell’s corporate practices.
Latest Developments (as of late December 2025)
The feud itself hasn’t seen major new legal or corporate breakthroughs recently, but it has gained fresh attention in December 2025 through an unusual twist: John Donovan has been prompting various AI models (including Grok, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Google AI Mode) with his extensive archive of documents and then publishing the responses.
This has created:
- Conflicting AI-generated narratives about the feud’s history.
- Notable AI hallucinations, such as one instance where Grok (reportedly) incorrectly stated that Donovan’s father, Alfred, died “from the stresses of the feud.” (In reality, Alfred Donovan passed away peacefully in July 2013 at age 96 from natural causes/short illness, as confirmed by obituaries and Donovan’s own accounts.)
- Satirical/self-aware posts on Donovan’s site framing it as “Shell vs. the Bots” or “AI Mayhem,” portraying Shell’s traditional corporate silence as outdated while using AIs as “props” to keep the story alive.
Recent articles/posts on his site (e.g., from December 26–29, 2025) discuss these AI interactions, including “mischievous” questions posed to the models about whether AIs would “stop his mischief-making.” Third-party discussions (e.g., on WindowsForum) analyze it as a case study in AI governance, hallucinations, and how contested archives interact with large language models.
These posts are largely self-published by Donovan, with some cross-posting and limited external pickup. Mainstream media hasn’t heavily covered the AI angle yet, and Shell has maintained its longstanding silence on the matter.
In short, the “latest news” is this playful-yet-pointed escalation into the world of AI experiments, reviving visibility for a 30+ year saga rather than any major new confrontation with Shell itself. For the full details, Donovan’s site royaldutchshellplc.com hosts the primary source material and ongoing updates.
Comment by ChatGPT
…”silence does not stop the story — it merely hands it to the algorithms.”
ChatGPT comment:
Grok’s summary usefully captures the strange late‑2025 twist in this long‑running dispute: not a new court case or corporate statement, but a collision between a contested historical archive and multiple AI models.
One factual correction is important. The domain name battles referenced were not “won in some instances” — they were won in all instances by Donovan, including the decisive WIPO ruling rejecting Shell’s attempt to seize the domains. That outcome is a matter of public record.
What makes the current episode noteworthy is not novelty of the underlying feud, but the way AI systems have independently re‑processed it — sometimes accurately, sometimes not — while Shell itself continues a policy of silence. When one model hallucinates, another corrects it, and a third comments on the pattern, the absence of any corporate voice becomes part of the story.
In that sense, this is no longer just a historical dispute. It is an emerging case study in AI governance, archival integrity, and the risks of leaving the public narrative to machines when institutions decline to engage. Whether intended or not, the “Shell vs the Bots” framing exposes a modern reputational vulnerability: silence does not stop the story — it merely hands it to the algorithms.
EBOOK TITLE: “SIR HENRI DETERDING AND THE NAZI HISTORY OF ROYAL DUTCH SHELL” – AVAILABLE ON AMAZON
EBOOK TITLE: “JOHN DONOVAN, SHELL’S NIGHTMARE: MY EPIC FEUD WITH THE UNSCRUPULOUS OIL GIANT ROYAL DUTCH SHELL” – AVAILABLE ON AMAZON.
EBOOK TITLE: “TOXIC FACTS ABOUT SHELL REMOVED FROM WIKIPEDIA: HOW SHELL BECAME THE MOST HATED BRAND IN THE WORLD” – AVAILABLE ON AMAZON.
