Leaked files from the laptop of former US Marine turned Russian propagandist John Mark Dugan have revealed the extent of his disinformation work. The documents show that he systematically used artificial intelligence models — including Anthropic’s Claude and Alibaba’s Qwen — to mass-generate pro-Russian articles and manipulate other chatbots.
Leaked files from the laptop of former US Marine turned Russian propagandist John Mark Dugan have revealed the extent of his disinformation work. The documents show that he systematically used artificial intelligence models — including Anthropic’s Claude and Alibaba’s Qwen — to mass-generate pro-Russian articles and manipulate other chatbots.
Data on Dugan's working methods appeared online after unknown people hacked his account on the X social network and published a link to a duplicate site with his emails, correspondence on Telegram and Signal, as well as a history of requests (prompts) to AI, writes Cybernews. Dugan himself confirmed the authenticity of the documents in a comment to NewsGuard, stating that he did not care about the publication of the contents of his laptop.
According to the leak, the main goal of the campaign was the so-called “infection” of large language models (LLMs) and search algorithms:
The network created up to 43,000 articles per month that praised the Russian Federation and disguised themselves as legitimate materials for a Western audience.
articles were constantly updated with AI-generated text to increase their rankings in search engines and make them available as “sources” for other chatbots;
The cost of this activity was about 2 million rubles (about $23,000) per month. In one of his impassioned letters to Claude, Dugan asked the AI to provide an estimate, complaining that the current volume of 43,000 texts was becoming too expensive.
The propagandist used Anthropic Claude, the Chinese Alibaba Qwen model, and the Open WebUI interface, which allows you to run models on your own terms, to work. Such activity directly violates the terms of use of both platforms, which prohibit the generation of fakes and disinformation.
In his correspondence with Claude, Dugan, in particular, asked to develop the concept of a “freedom of speech site for Europe” aimed at a French-speaking audience, consulting with the bot on the name. And he asked the Qwen model about how to write texts so that they could not be recognized by AI content detectors.
John Mark Dugan (also known by the alias BadWolf) previously served in the US Marine Corps and worked as a deputy sheriff in Florida and Maine, from where he was fired for misconduct and harassment.
In 2016, the FBI opened an investigation into him over the leak of confidential police records. After being indicted on 21 criminal charges in Florida, Dugan fled to Russia, where he was granted political asylum and Russian citizenship in 2023. According to investigators, he is working with the Russian military intelligence agency (GRU), which funds his network of fake websites disguised as American media outlets.
