Troops and aircraft deployed to the Middle East this spring to interdict a vessel from China after a chatbot misidentified its cargo as nuclear weapons components. A US Special Operations Command Pacific analyst used AI to assess the ship's manifest and produce a report circulated throughout the military. Officials canceled the operation just before the boardings began upon discovering the assessment was entirely false.

The near-operation occurred during a war with Iran and highlighted the lack of a single US standard for verifying AI-generated intelligence. Sources noted that AI hallucinations have happened repeatedly across the intelligence community. One source stated that boarding the Chinese ship could have spiraled into an armed conflict between the two nations.