US military had close call after using AI for false intel report, CNN says

US forces came close to an armed confrontation this spring during the war with Iran after acting on an intelligence report produced with the help of artificial intelligence that was, according to sources, false. CNN reported on September 18 that the report, circulated across the US military, warned that a Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.

According to four sources familiar with the episode, the US military moved into action with plans to intercept the vessel. Two of those sources said armed US military personnel were preparing to board the ship, and military aircraft were in the air. Only just before the planned operation did officials dig deeper and find that an analyst at a special operations command had produced the report with AI help, and that the chatbot had inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. CNN could not learn what the misidentified cargo was. One source described the report as entirely false and said it almost started a war.

Where the AI entered the chain

The analyst had queried a chatbot about intelligence reporting on the ship's manifest that originated with US Special Operations Command Pacific, based in Hawaii. It is unclear whether the chatbot was a commercial or a government product. The bot fused open-source intelligence with secret signals intelligence and reached its conclusion about the cargo. The analyst then used AI again to package the findings into a standard intelligence report and disseminated it.

"The internal tools are mostly just copies of the commercial stuff wearing lipstick," a former senior US official familiar with the AI systems used by military and intelligence analysts told CNN. US Special Operations Command Pacific and the Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.

Push for AI, and no single standard

The rationale for rapid adoption is speed: AI is meant to help commanders decide which targets to strike or where to move assets. In January, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth released an Artificial Intelligence Acceleration Strategy intended to speed up military use of the technology, aiming to put AI in the hands of the department's three million civilian and military personnel at all classification levels.

But the effort is decentralised, according to multiple US officials: different parts of government use different tools under different orders and safety standards, with no single set of rules for verifying what those tools produce.

Sources said the kind of hallucination seen in this case has not been an isolated incident since such tools spread across government. Some senior officials say AI pressures analysts to produce intelligence faster, opening the door to mistakes, while younger analysts who grew up on these tools tend to trust them uncritically. "AI allows you to get to a bad idea faster," one source said. Another source said AI use in targeting is ramping up with no real guidance on how keeping a human in the loop will prevent civilian casualties or friendly fire.