<
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-false-intelligence-china-ship>
"The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the
midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in
the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.
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) — and that a
chatbot the analyst had used inaccurately identified the material the ship was
carrying.
CNN was not able to learn what the misidentified cargo was.
The report, according to one of the sources, was “entirely false.” But it also
“almost started a war,” the source said. Any US operation against a Chinese
vessel could have risked spiraling into an armed conflict between the two
nations.
Across the US military and the intelligence community, officials are pushing to
weave AI into nearly every facet of their work, from analyzing the huge volumes
of raw intelligence the US collects and selecting targets for strikes, to more
mundane applications like managing budgeting, logistics and supply chains.
But the episode underscores the profound risks of using this powerful, new and
relatively poorly understood technology for targeting in the middle of a war.
Analysts have long feared that AI could lead to a catastrophic miscalculation
if nation states are relying on poor or corrupted data — the kind of
miscalculation that might lead the United States to fire on a Chinese ship
based on inaccurate information."
Via Joyce Donahue.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
