The US military swung into action to intercept a Chinese ship in West Asia earlier this year, which, according to an intelligence report circulated at the time, was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.
Citing sources, plans were put into motion for armed US military personnel to board the ship and military planes were already in the air, according to a report by CNN. A chatbot used by the analyst inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying, according to sources quoted in the report.
It was unclear whether the chatbot was a commercially available product or a US government product. The bot fused together open-source intelligence with secret signals intelligence in government holdings and reached its fateful conclusion about the material the ship was carrying. Neither the US Special Operations Command Pacific nor the Pentagon has issued any official statement on the issue. The reason given: It can help the military make battlefield decisions, like which targets to strike or which military assets to move where, faster. There’s no one set of standards for how the US verifies the information generated by these tools. The report claimed the vessel was carrying parts linked to a nuclear weapons programme. Officials only stopped after taking a closer look at the report and finding that an AI chatbot had wrongly identified the ship’s cargo.
The analyst queried a chatbot about some intelligence reporting on the ship’s manifest that originated with US Special Operations Command Pacific, based in Hawaii, according to the report. But the issue is, according to intelligence experts quoted in the report, that different parts of the government use different tools under different orders and safety standards. Earlier reporting noted: US military AI blunder: False intelligence on Chinese ship ‘almost started a war,’ report claims A false intelligence report created with help from artificial intelligence nearly led the US military to intercept a Chinese ship in the Middle East , according to CNN . Earlier reporting noted: Military officials began preparing an operation, with armed personnel ready to board the ship and military aircraft already in the air, according to sources familiar with the incident. Earlier reporting noted: One source called the report “entirely false” and said it “almost started a war.”
Since the Donald Trump administration came to power in January last year, it has pushed for faster AI integration in the US intelligence apparatus.
