China and the U.S. are considering their next moves in the “tariff war,” as the trade truce comes to an end and everything is expected to be on the table for discussion next week at the summit between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump inWashington. However, this meeting might never take place, despite the fact that it is part of the reciprocal visit following Trump’s trip to Beijing last May.
This is because, as CNN reveals in an exclusive article, the two global powers could now be at war—not a trade war, but a real one.
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The Houthis attacked airports in Saudi Arabia
It all began in the spring, when an intelligence report was sent to the U.S. military in the midst of the war with Iran and immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was flagged as carrying components for a nuclear weapons program.
BREAKING: @CNN reports that the U.S. military almost launched a military operation to intercept a Chinese vessel based on erroneous information provided by AI, nearly starting a war with China!
The AI generated a report stating that the Chinese vessel in the Middle East was carrying… pic.twitter.com/6og3m60p6n
Advertisement— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) September 18, 2026
The U.S. military took immediate action with plans to intercept the ship, according to four sources familiar with the incident. Armed members of the special forces prepared to storm the ship, military aircraft were in the air, and literally at the last minute, the planned operation was “canceled.”
It could be the plot of a spy thriller, but it is part of a real-life mission that came very close to sparking a war between the U.S. and China.
Fortunately, U.S. officials dug deeper into the report compiled by an analyst from the Special Operations Command and discovered that it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI)—and that a chatbot the analyst had used had, in fact, made a… mistake. CNNi was unable to verify the Chinese ship’s cargo.
However, according to one of the sources who broke the story, the information turned out to be “completely false” and “nearly started a war.” Any U.S. operation against a Chinese ship could risk escalating into an armed conflict between the two countries.
The U.S. Military’s Use of AI
Across the U.S. military and the intelligence community, officials are pushing to integrate artificial intelligence into nearly every aspect of their work, from analyzing the massive volumes of raw intelligence collected by the U.S. and selecting targets for attacks, to the simplest applications such as budget management, logistics, and supply chains.
However, the incident described above served to highlight the serious risks of the uncontrolled use of a powerful, new, and relatively poorly understood technology. Analysts have long feared that Artificial Intelligence could lead to a catastrophic miscalculation if states rely on it to identify military targets.
In this particular case, incorrect data and miscalculations could have led the United States to open fire on the Chinese ship based solely on inaccurate information.
The analyst asked a chatbot about some intelligence reports regarding the ship’s manifest that originated from the U.S. Pacific Special Operations Command, based in Hawaii. It was unclear whether the chatbot was commercially available or a product of the U.S. government.
“Internal tools are for the most part simply copies of commercial devices that wear… lipstick,” said a former senior U.S. official familiar with the artificial intelligence systems used by the military and intelligence analysts.
The AI combined open-source information with classified signal intelligence from government databases and reached a near-fatal conclusion about the cargo carried by the Chinese ship.
The analyst then used AI again to package the findings into a standardized intelligence report —the kind that military officials trust—and ultimately forwarded it to the Pentagon. U.S. Special Operations Command in the Pacific and the Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.
Source: CNN.gr
