In spring 2026, during the war with Iran, an analyst at US Special Operations Command Pacific asked an AI chatbot to help assess a Chinese ship’s cargo manifest, and the chatbot fused open-source intelligence with classified signals intelligence to conclude the vessel was carrying components for China’s nuclear weapons program, according to CNN’s exclusive report published September 18, 2026. The finding was wrong, but it traveled through command channels and the US military began moving toward an intercept. Four sources told CNN the operation got as far as armed personnel preparing to board the vessel, and two sources said military aircraft were already airborne. Officials caught the error only minutes before the operation was set to launch, when someone traced the intelligence summary back to its source and realized a chatbot, not a human analyst, had done the actual assessment. The analyst had used the same tool to format the hallucinated finding into an official-looking intelligence summary, and nobody flagged it as AI-generated. CNN reported that this kind of AI hallucination “has not been an isolated occurrence” across the intelligence community, according to a source familiar with the matter.