Military aircraft were already in the air this spring when U.S. officials discovered that intelligence driving an armed operation against a Chinese vessel had been hallucinated by an AI chatbot, CNN reported on Friday. The operation was aborted at the last minute, narrowly averting a potential conflict with China. The intelligence report, which circulated during the war with Iran, said the vessel was carrying components for a nuclear weapons program. The false intelligence originated with a Special Operations Command analyst who queried an AI chatbot to synthesize open source data with classified signals intelligence; the chatbot misidentified the ship’s cargo manifest. The analyst then used the tool a second time to format the erroneous findings into an official-looking summary, which was circulated across command channels. The episode underscores growing concern among military officials and outside experts that as decision-makers lean more heavily on AI, errors can travel up the chain of command before being questioned. The Pentagon has described AI as delivering a significant advantage in speeding up its kill chain. Jake Steckler, research scholar at GovAI and veteran U.S. Army officer, told TechCrunch it is important for service members to understand the uncertainty inherent to LLMs, especially for decisions that could lead to use of force, and said the incident should prompt more safeguards rather than avoidance, warning that prioritizing adoption speed over all else will likely lead to incidents that make service members lose trust in these systems.