The US military narrowly avoided boarding a Chinese ship based on an "entirely false" intelligence report generated with AI assistance, according to CNN. The erroneous report, submitted by a US Special Operations Command analyst, claimed the Chinese vessel was transporting nuclear arms program components through the Middle East. Four sources familiar with the incident confirmed the near-miss.

The US was preparing to intercept and board the ship with air support before discovering that a chatbot used in the analysis had "inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying." One source told CNN the AI-powered fiasco "almost started a war." The analyst used a chatbot to analyze intelligence reports regarding the ship's manifest, which fused open-source intelligence with secret signals intelligence. The resulting report almost triggered a disastrous chain of events. This incident represents one of the more consequential examples of AI hallucination undermining professional reporting.

Since "hallucinating" became Cambridge Dictionary's word of the year in 2023, numerous professionals including journalists, researchers, judges, doctors, and police departments have been misled by AI tools that fabricate information. Despite efforts to prevent hallucinations, researchers suggest it may be impossible to fully stop LLMs from generating false content. The Department of Defense recently rolled out an "AI acceleration strategy" to make data available across systems for AI exploitation.