“The story, which did not go out on the wire to our customers, didn’t go through our standard editing process. We are looking into how that happened,” AP spokesperson Nicole Meir told The Verge in an email.

News reports (and fact-checks specifically) are often worded in a way that carefully threads a needle — there’s a difference between saying something definitively didn’t happen versus saying there’s no evidence of it. My guess is that the AP headline was the problem here because it claims to debunk something that is unknowable.