AI-generated report nearly triggered US operation on Chinese ship

A false intelligence report prepared with the help of artificial intelligence reportedly came close to triggering a US military operation against a Chinese vessel in West Asia during the war with Iran, CNN noted, citing several sources familiar with the incident, Report informs.

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.

The bot fused together open-source intelligence with secret signals intelligence in government holdings and reached its fateful conclusion about the material the ship was carrying.

The analyst then used AI again to package the findings into a standard intelligence report - the kind that is trusted by military officials - and disseminated it.