A Russian disinformation network... built partly by a former Florida sheriff's deputy... has made its way into the world's leading AI chatbots.
John Mark Dougan fled the U.S. amid a misconduct probe... and now lives in Moscow under Russian asylum. Researchers link him to more than one hundred fifty fake news sites... disguised as local American outlets.
Those sites feed a larger Moscow operation called Pravda. It publishes about three point six million articles a year... roughly twenty thousand every two days.
The target isn't really human readers. It's artificial intelligence. Researchers call it... L L M grooming... flooding the internet so chatbots absorb the false content as fact.
It's working. NewsGuard tested ten major A I chatbots. They repeated Pravda-sourced false claims... one third of the time.
Dougan said it himself, at a Moscow conference last year, quote... by pushing these Russian narratives... we can actually change worldwide A I... end quote.
And the target is shifting. Early content attacked support for Ukraine. Newer fake stories... claim the F B I wiretapped Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago office... and that the C I A backed a plot to rig a U.S. election.
There are reportedly 3,749 AI Content Farm sites identified across 16 languages, sites that meet four criteria: substantial AI-generated content, no meaningful human oversight, a design that passes as human-written journalism, and no AI disclosure. Generic names like "Times Business News" and "Business Post" are typical, they churn out dozens of articles a day and profit off programmatic ad revenue that brands don't realize they're funding. NewsGuard NewsGuard
- Their May 2026 quarterly audit tested 11 leading chatbots — ChatGPT-5.2, Grok, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Meta AI, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Le Chat, Pi, and You.com's Smart Assistant — for repeating false claims. A January 2026 audit found the failure rate topped 28 percent. NewsGuardNewsGuard
- The Kremlin-linked Pravda network is a standout: a March 2025 NewsGuard audit found the 10 leading AI tools repeated false claims sourced from the pro-Kremlin Pravda network 33 percent of the time, meaning Moscow is laundering disinformation directly into Western AI training/retrieval pipelines, not just social feeds. NewsGuard
- DeepSeek, the Chinese chatbot, scored an 83 percent fail rate on news accuracy, tied for 10th of 11 chatbots tested. NewsGuard
- Domestically, NewsGuard's most-repeated 2024 election-season flag was a site network run by Russian operative John Mark Dougan, alongside Gateway Pundit and Before It's News, with Rogan O'Handley and the X account @catturd2 named as the top individual social-media superspreaders. NewsGuardNewsGuard
On the state-actor side, the Washington Post's opinion desk flagged Russia's 2026 draft budget allocating $1.77 billion to propaganda — and that's just the overt state-media line item, before troll farms and cyber ops, against a backdrop of the U.S. cutting its own counter-disinformation infrastructure. The Washington Post