In September 2026, a threshold was crossed in the long history of states shaping foreign minds: Iran and China deployed influence campaigns run not by human operators, but by autonomous artificial intelligence systems capable of generating, distributing, and refining persuasive content without rest or hesitation. Built on Chinese open-source models freely available to the world, these operations revealed that the most consequential innovations in information warfare no longer require secrecy — only ingenuity in weaponization. The discovery forces a reckoning not merely with what these particul