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Title: Fake AI Intelligence Almost Made the US Military Start a War With
China

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/09/19/0622...

U.S. military intelligence received an inaccurate report this spring that a
Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear
weapons program, reports CNN. "The US military swung into action with plans
to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the
episode." Armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship
[according to two of the sources]. Military planes were in the air, one of
those sources and another source familiar with the incident said. It was only
just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report
put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been
generated with the help of AI - and that a chatbot the analyst had used
inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. The report,
according to one of the sources, was "entirely false." But it also "almost
started a war," the source said. Any US operation against a Chinese vessel
could have risked spiraling into an armed conflict between the two nations.
Across the US military and the intelligence community, officials are pushing
to weave AI into nearly every facet of their work, from analyzing the huge
volumes of raw intelligence the US collects and selecting targets for
strikes, to more mundane applications like managing budgeting, logistics and
supply chains. But the episode underscores the profound risks of using this
powerful, new and relatively poorly understood technology for targeting in
the middle of a war... Officials say the US can't afford to fall behind in
integrating AI in case it must one day fight China or another adversary who
would potentially be able to stay one step ahead of the US. In January,
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth released his agency's "Artificial Intelligence
Acceleration Strategy" in a bid to speed up the military's use of AI. "We
will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus our
investments and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead
in military AI," Hegseth said in a speech announcing the strategy. Thanks to
long-time Slashdot reader stabiesoft for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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