A false intelligence report produced with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) reportedly came close to triggering a US military operation against a Chinese vessel in West Asia during the war with Iran.
The assessment immediately raised alarm within the US military and prompted preparations to intercept the vessel, CNN reported.
Two sources said armed US military personnel were preparing to board the ship, while two others said military aircraft were already in the air. A chatbot used by an analyst at US Special Operations Command had inaccurately identified the material being transported by the ship, according to the sources. CNN said it was unable to determine what the cargo actually was. The same source said the incident ‘almost started a war’, warning that any US military operation against a Chinese vessel could have risked escalating into an armed conflict between the two countries. The analyst had queried a chatbot about intelligence reporting concerning the ship’s manifest, according to CNN.
The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring, claimed that the Chinese ship was carrying components linked to a nuclear weapons programme. The original reporting had come from US Special Operations Command Pacific, based in Hawaii.
A memo announcing the initiative said its objective was to ‘democratise AI experimentation and transformation across the Department by putting America’s world-leading AI models directly in the hands of our three million civilian and military personnel, at all classification levels’. However, multiple US officials familiar with the situation told CNN that AI adoption remains decentralised, with different parts of the government using different systems, orders and safety standards. There is no single set of standards governing how information generated by these systems is verified, according to the report.
It remained unclear whether the chatbot was a commercially available system or a product developed by the US government. The strategy also calls for expanding access to AI across the US Department of War.
