US was ‘on brink of war’ with China over false AI report of nukes moving in Middle East

An analyst is said to have used a chatbot that wrongly identified the nature of the Chinese ship’s cargo.

The US reportedly “almost started a war” against China after an AI chatbot wrongly concluded a Chinese ship was carrying a nuclear weapons component.

The incident happened this spring, when the vessel was spotted in the Middle East amid America’s war with Iran. The US was preparing to board the vessel and planes were circling, with plans to intercept the ship underway.

But, once officials had a more detailed look into the intelligence report that led to the large-scale response, they realised it had been generated with the help of AI, CNN reports. An analyst is said to have used a chatbot that wrongly identified the nature of the Chinese ship’s cargo, suggesting the vessel was transporting components of a nuclear weapons programme.

What exactly the vessel was transporting remains unclear to this day, with one source telling CNN that the intelligence report was “entirely false” but “almost started a war” between the US and China.

It is also unclear whether the AI chatbot used by the US analyst was one that is commercially available or one that has been developed by the US government. However, a former senior US official who has knowledge of the AI systems used by the country’s military said the internal tools are “mostly just copies of the commercial stuff wearing lipstick”.

The AI bot reached its almost catastrophic conclusion after fusing together open-source intelligence with secret signals intelligence in government holdings. AI was once again then used by the analyst to list the findings into an intelligence report.

Mirror Online has approached the Pentagon and US Special Operations Command Pacific for comment.

An “Artificial Intelligence Acceleration Strategy” was released in January by Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth which aims to accelerate the military’s use of AI. Hegseth said this will “unleash experimentation and eliminate bureaucratic barriers”. But the incident in spring is not isolated, a source told CNN, while another said “AI allows you to get to a bad idea faster”.

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