Cisco Tests AI for Security Incident Reports, Finds Hallucinations, Cross-Contamination, and a Spell-Checker Worse Than Chance

Cisco's Talos Incident Response team ran AI through its paces writing security incident reports based on tabletop exercises, and the results were… mixed, to put it charitably. With enough granular prompting, the team cut drafting time by 50% and even fooled peer reviewers into complimenting the prose — while the AI was quietly ignoring critical information, swapping content between sessions, and occasionally recommending both a full password reset and a targeted one, depending on its mood.

The team's crowning achievement was a spelling-and-grammar-checking prompt that hallucinated grammar problems that didn't exist, missed ones that did, and clocked in below a 50% success rate — which, as Cisco noted, makes it "currently unsuitable for production use." To be fair, that bar is usually set slightly higher than a coin flip. Cisco's takeaway: AI can help, but humans must "take ownership of every word" — which raises the question of how much time you're actually saving.