How did an AI hallucination nearly trigger a US military operation?

A false AI-generated intelligence report nearly set a real US military operation in motion — the starkest warning yet that automated analysis without human verification can manufacture its own emergencies. The lesson isn’t that AI is useless for analysis; it’s that every AI output in a high-stakes chain needs a provenance check: where did this claim come from, and can a human confirm it from a second source? Apply the same rule at a smaller scale if you use AI summaries at work — never forward an AI-generated fact you haven’t verified, especially when someone might act on it. (Factual news coverage only.)