Leaked files show Russian propagandist used Claude and Qwen to churn out pro-Kremlin content

Files leaked from the laptop of John Mark Dougan, a former Florida deputy sheriff who fled to Moscow in 2016 and became a Kremlin propagandist, show him trying to tilt AI chatbots "towards Russia's favor", according to a review by NewsGuard. The documents were leaked on 10 November, and Dougan confirmed their authenticity to NewsGuard.

One undated document describes flooding the web with reworded pro-Russian news and AI-generated material so that search engines and large language models pick it up. In a prompt to Claude, Dougan wrote that his network was producing 43,000 articles a month. Another file asks for Russian news archives to fine-tune an "uncensored LLM" on pro-Russian sources.

The leak includes dozens of chats from April to August 2026 with Anthropic's Claude and Qwen from Alibaba. NewsGuard found Claude helping him name and word a "free speech site for Europe" for French readers, and Qwen writing a Telegram post about the US midterms and advising him how to make text undetectable as AI. Both companies' policies ban this kind of use; neither responded to NewsGuard. Microsoft tracks Dougan's operation as part of the Russian campaign Storm-1516.