The intelligence report circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran set off alarm bells: a Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons programme.
The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel. Armed members were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air.
It was only just before the planned operation that officials found the report had been generated with AI help — a chatbot inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. The report was “entirely false” but “almost started a war,” one source said.
The analyst at US Special Operations Command Pacific used a chatbot to fuse open-source intelligence with secret signals intelligence, then used AI again to format findings into a standard intelligence report disseminated across command channels. CNN could not learn which chatbot or what the misidentified cargo actually was.