shell donovan feud

The shell donovan feud refers to a long-running dispute between John Donovan and Royal Dutch Shell that has recently escalated through the use of generative AI. This feud now involves feeding decades of archival material into multiple public chatbots, with the divergent outputs published as a form of public provocation. This 'bot war' reframes the 30-year conflict as an experiment in AI amplification, exposing how archives, adversarial prompting, and model disagreement can create fast-moving reputational shocks. The feud highlights challenges that traditional PR and litigation strategies were not designed to handle, as digital amplification introduces new dynamics to an established corporate dispute.