An intelligence report that circulated throughout the US military this spring immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was reportedly transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.
The U.S. military had swung into high gear — armed members prepping to board the ship, planes in the air — when officials realized the report had been generated with the aid of an AI chatbot that had misidentified the ship’s cargo.
Like I said on my podcast Uncovered yesterday, the danger of AI is not that it will send a “robot army” to cause destruction like idiot Trump said, it is something like this. When AI is used to select targets and fire the weapon, that is when we will have problems.…
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) September 18, 2026
From Axios:
It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) — and that a chatbot the analyst had used inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. CNN was not able to learn what the misidentified cargo was.
The report, according to one of the sources, was “entirely false.” But it also “almost started a war,” the source said. Any US operation against a Chinese vessel could have risked spiraling into an armed conflict between the two nations.
The episode underscores the profound risks of using this powerful, new and relatively poorly understood technology for targeting in the middle of a war.
Analysts have long feared that AI could lead to a catastrophic miscalculation if nation states are relying on poor or corrupted data — the kind of miscalculation that might lead the United States to fire on a Chinese ship based on inaccurate information.
Read more here.
Hegseth’s flawed artificial intelligence push nearly led the U.S. military into war with an Asian superpower, a bombshell new report has revealed.
https://t.co/vg8z8Q4hCO— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) September 18, 2026
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