It's not ambiguous, it's wrong. Blatantly so. And until I read the comments, this article was making no sense at all to me because of it.
"Animated GIF" is a specific term for a specific thing with specific technical meaning--something that is widely used at that. Small looping video clips in another format, even if they serve the same purpose (and do it drastically better since animated GIF compression is embarrassingly inefficient), are no more "animated GIFs" than a RAW file is a JPEG.
We don't call a JPEG image of some text a "web page", we don't call FLAC files "MP3s", and if you start calling blu-ray discs or VCDs "DVDs", even though they all store video and look superficially the same, you're going to get some very annoyed people.
Why should any self-respecting news outlet call proper looping video clips "animated GIFs" when they're not?