The United States has abandoned the boarding of a Chinese ship in the Middle East, envisaged on the basis of a report partly written by IA, according to CNN
The US military almost boarded a Chinese ship in the Middle East this spring on the basis of an erroneous intelligence report developed using artificial intelligence (AI), CNN reported on Friday (September 18), citing four anonymous sources familiar with the incident. The date of this incident or the location of the vessel are unknown at this stage. The Pentagon and the US Special Operations Command for the Pacific did not respond to the channel’s requests on this subject. Asked by Agence France-Presse (AFP) about this incident, the American army did not immediately respond.
A US intelligence report had claimed that the ship was carrying components linked to nuclear weapons, prompting US forces to prepare for its interception, according to the media. The operation was already at an advanced stage: armed military personnel were preparing to board, according to two CNN sources, and U.S. planes had taken off when officials re-examined the intelligence that led to the report.
They then discovered that a Special Operations Command analyst had used an AI chatbot, which misidentified the shipment. The tool had cross-referenced open source information with classified signals intelligence before reaching an erroneous conclusion. The analyst then used AI again to format this information in the intelligence report distributed within the army.
More experienced analysts with subject matter expertise eventually reviewed the original data, noticed the error, and allowed the operation to be rolled back. CNN could not determine what the ship was actually carrying or whether the tool used was a commercial chatbot or an internal US government system.
The media Politico revealed on Friday another incident involving China: parts of F-35 stealth fighter jets, including a cockpit canopy, were diverted to Hong Kong and are now untraceable, raising fears that Beijing could have accessed sensitive American military technologies. The parts had been shipped from Australia to the United States for repairs when the diversion occurred, according to the media, which specifies that the reasons for this change of route and the current location of the parts were unknown.
