Armed US personnel prepared to board a Chinese vessel in the Middle East during the Iran war after an AI assisted report falsely claimed the ship carried nuclear weapons components. Military aircraft were airborne before officials discovered the report, which had been circulated throughout the US military this spring, was entirely false and based on a chatbot's misidentification of the cargo.

A Special Operations Command Pacific analyst used a chatbot to fuse open source material with classified signals intelligence to assess the ship's manifest before using AI to package the result into a standard report. US officials say no single standard exists for verifying AI generated intelligence, and sources say the error could have damaged diplomatic relations between the US and China before a meeting between President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping.