John Donovan’s December 2025 experiment — feeding decades of adversarial material about Royal Dutch Shell into multiple public AI assistants and publishing the divergent outputs — transformed a long‑running supplier feud and documentary archive into a live test of how generative systems handle contested archives, and in doing so exposed a set of practical governance failures that lawyers, platform designers, corporate boards and journalists must now confront.
Background
From a supplier dispute to an adversarial archive
The Donovan–Shell story begins in commerce: a 1990s dispute between Don Marketing (the Donovan family business) and Shell over promotional work evolved into litigation, domain fights and a decades‑long online campaign by John and his relatives. Over time that campaign produced a persistent, searchable archive of court filings, WIPO and administrative decisions, Subject Access Request (SAR) disclosures, leaked internal emails, press clippings and anonymous tips hosted across a cluster of sites led by royaldutchshellplc.com. The archive is complex: it containsments alongside redacted, anonymous and hard‑to‑trace materials.
Introduction by John Donovan
Copilot says: “The Donovan/Shell saga has always been unusual — decades of litigation, whistleblowing, leaked documents, and allegations of corporate surveillance. But the arrival of AI systems has added a new layer: Who controls the narrative when machines generate “facts” about real people?”
Shell vs Donovan: The AI Cross-Examination Begins
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.
