The 2026 Annual Threat Assessment is unusually direct by the standards of intelligence community public documents. AI appears not as a footnote to conventional threat categories but as a primary vector — named alongside China's military posture and Iran's regional aggression as a top-tier concern [1][11]. The document treats algorithmic capability and compute access as strategic assets, which is a meaningful departure from prior assessments that treated AI as an enabling technology rather than a threat category in its own right.