AI 'kill chain': What happens when humans trust bad data at the worst possible moment

Artificial intelligence is the biggest story of our time. It writes code, drafts legal notes, plans wedding menus and reads medical scans. Companies rebrand themselves around it, investors pour billions into it and governments race each other to build it first. Every boardroom, conference and family WhatsApp group seems to have a view on where it is heading.Even my friend Ayush has joined the chorus. This is a man who once needed three phone calls to split a restaurant bill on UPI. Today he lectures me about large language models, prompt engineering and why my job will disappear by 2030.It is easy to laugh at the hype. Most of it is seemingly harmless.But the same technology has moved somewhere far less funny. It now sits inside military command rooms, helping process the information used to decide what gets hit.Two incidents from 2026 show why that matters.