In a startling revelation on Wednesday, US media outlet CNN reported that during the US military campaign against Iran this spring, American forces were almost misled by a false intelligence report generated using artificial intelligence, narrowly avoiding a full-scale armed boarding of a Chinese ship.
The claim, sourced from multiple insiders, indicates that the report which nearly triggered a clash between US troops and Chinese vessels was produced by US military intelligence personnel using AI during the spring offensive. At the time, Washington had already initiated hostilities against Iran, and the intelligence, which asserted that a Chinese ship was transporting nuclear weapons components to Tehran in the Middle East, quickly drew intense scrutiny from US commanders.
According to insiders cited by CNN, US forces immediately began formulating operational plans based on this intelligence, including deploying heavily armed soldiers to board the Chinese vessel and mobilizing fighter jets for support. However, just as troops were preparing to execute the mission, a routine review of the intelligence uncovered a critical flaw: the report was fabricated by an analyst using AI, based on hallucinations from a chatbot.
Sources revealed that the claim about the Chinese ship carrying nuclear-related parts to Iran was a false judgment generated by an AI chatbot. One insider expressed relief that such a completely fabricated report nearly escalated tensions between the US and China, noting that a full military boarding could have led to unpredictable and severe conflict risks between the two superpowers.
Neither the US military nor official government bodies have commented on the matter, and the identity of the Chinese vessel in question remains undisclosed. Nevertheless, CNN underscored that this incident highlights a long-standing and significant concern among AI critics: prematurely deploying immature AI technology in combat intelligence analysis could yield catastrophic outcomes.
Familiar sources within US military and intelligence circles suggested that the AI model used may have been a commercial product with a "repackaged" appearance. This model allegedly combined open-source information with classified internal data, generating false conclusions through its own hallucination capabilities, which were then dressed up by analysts as professional military intelligence.
Moreover, CNN pointed out that different US government and military departments use disparate AI models, and this decentralized approach means there is no unified standard for rigor and safety. If deployed on the battlefield, this could lead to strikes on entirely incorrect targets or inadvertently cause civilian casualties.
However, some social media users argued that the US military is shifting blame to AI for what may be pre-existing analytical flaws. They noted that AI errors could only mislead forces if analysts were overly credulous. Even before the AI era, US forces repeatedly made severe mistakes based on faulty intelligence, including the flawed justification for invading Iraq over weapons of mass destruction and the erroneous bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.
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