Armed US personnel were prepared to board a Chinese vessel in the Middle East this spring after a chatbot mistakenly identified the cargo as nuclear weapons components. Military aircraft were already airborne during the operation, which took place during the US war with Iran, before officials halted the mission. CNN reported the incident on Friday, citing four sources who stated that the intelligence report was found to be entirely false shortly before the boarding began.

A Special Operations Command analyst used a chatbot to combine open-source material with classified signals intelligence and then used AI to draft the final report circulated across the military. The AI misidentified material on the ship's manifest, leading to a critical error that one source said almost started a war between Washington and Beijing. CNN could not determine what the cargo actually consisted of.