> The FAA has reassured the public and airlines that SMART only suggests routes and doesn't affect air safety.

Seems unlikely.

Depends if an AI DoSed an important service or not.

There used to be a lot of invisible gatekeepers in a pre-AI world. At work, everyone can ask their agent to query SQL on databases that they were supposed to use through an application. The application and the security by obscurity(end users didn't know how to connect to the DB nor did they know SQL) were the gate keepers.

That was my thinking as well. AI sending out requests to legacy stable systems is often not a good mix and can overwhelm things pretty quickly.

Awkward timing, to say the least.

Those engineers are no doubt panicking, even if they aren't the cause.

While I don't have insider knowledge of this particular deployment, there was a strong industry-wide push towards "ship unreviewed AI generated code and hope for the best", partly driven by the fact that AI writes code faster than humans have bandwidth to properly review.

Under the hypothesis that some under-reviewed AI generated code made it into prod, the situation could be qualified as "engineers are panicking, because they don't know if they are the cause or not"

Doubtful. That tool likely suggests "improved" clearances, which a controller can use at their discretion. It likely does not control clearances directly.

And the early reports describe the issue as related to ATC communication infrastructure.