A U.S. military intelligence report produced during the war with Iran claimed that a Chinese ship was carrying components of a nuclear weapons program, prompting American forces to prepare to seize the vessel before officials discovered the report had been generated with artificial intelligence and was false, CNN reported Friday.
The report circulated across the U.S. military this spring and set off immediate alarm, according to four sources familiar with the episode. The military drew up plans to intercept the ship. Two of the sources said armed American personnel were preparing to board it, and military aircraft were already in the air.
Only just before the operation did officials examine the report more closely. It had been put together by a special operations command analyst, and a chatbot the analyst used had inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. CNN said it was unable to determine what the cargo actually was.
One source described the report as "entirely false." The same source said it "almost started a war," since an American operation against a Chinese vessel could have escalated into armed conflict between the two powers.
According to CNN, the analyst had queried a chatbot about intelligence reporting on the ship's manifest that originated with U.S. Special Operations Command Pacific, based in Hawaii. The chatbot combined open-source information with classified signals intelligence to reach its conclusion. It was not clear whether the tool was a commercially available chatbot or a U.S. government product.
Analysts have long warned that AI systems relying on poor or corrupted data could produce a catastrophic miscalculation, including an American strike on a Chinese target based on inaccurate information.
The Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is pushing to expand the use of artificial intelligence across the armed forces, and days before Chinese President Xi Jinping's scheduled visit to Washington on September 24, where the use of artificial intelligence is expected to be among the topics discussed.
