A chatbot’s bad guess about a cargo ship nearly dragged the U.S. into a shooting war with China this spring, CNN exclusively reported on Friday.
A U.S. Special Operations Command Pacific analyst asked an AI chatbot to analyze a Chinese vessel’s manifest in the Middle East amid the war with Iran, four sources familiar with the episode told CNN’s Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen, who added the bot “fused together open-source intelligence with secret signals intelligence in government holdings” to wrongly conclude the ship was “hauling components” for a nuclear weapons program. The analyst then used AI again to package the finding into “a standard intelligence report” that was sent up the chain of command.
According to the report, “The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode. According to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air, one of those sources and another source familiar with the incident said. It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).”
“Entirely false,” one source called it before admitting to CNN that it “almost started a war,” since any U.S. assault on a Chinese ship carried the possibility of retaliation.
The scare comes as the Pentagon races to embed AI into everything from targeting to logistics, following Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s January push to “unleash experimentation” and arm three million personnel with AI tools.
Critics say the technology remains dangerously unready, with a top Army cyber general recently warning AI has caused a “tenfold” spike in vulnerabilities across the Pentagon’s aging networks. Insiders have described a Pentagon under Hegseth already gripped by dysfunction.
Special Operations Command Pacific and the Pentagon declined to comment when pressed by CNN.
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