The U.S. military prepared to intercept a Chinese ship in the Middle East this spring after an AI-assisted intelligence report wrongly identified its cargo as components of a nuclear weapons program, CNN reports. Armed personnel were getting ready to board the vessel, according to two of four people familiar with the episode who spoke to CNN. Two sources said military aircraft were already in the air. Officials discovered the error before the planned operation went ahead.
The report began with an analyst asking a chatbot about intelligence on the ship's cargo manifest that originated with U.S. Special Operations Command Pacific. According to CNN, the tool combined publicly available information with classified signals intelligence and reached the wrong conclusion about the cargo. The analyst then used AI again to put that conclusion into a standard intelligence-report format and circulated it.
The error was caught before boarding
Officials examined the report more closely just before the planned operation and found that the chatbot had misidentified what the ship was carrying, CNN says. The outlet could not determine the actual cargo or whether the chatbot was a commercial product or a government-built tool. One source described the report as “entirely false.”
The account has not been publicly confirmed by the military. The Pentagon and U.S. Special Operations Command Pacific did not respond to CNN's requests for comment. CNN's on-air account from coauthor Zachary Cohen likewise described a possible boarding that was stopped, not an interception that took place.
In January, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a strategy to accelerate AI use across the military. CNN reported that military and intelligence organizations are using different AI tools under varying instructions and safety practices, without a single standard for verifying their output. Its reporting does not establish which checks, if any, this particular report passed before it was circulated.
