somewhere around 1990, working at a Dod lab, I picked up on the 'neural network' craze and did a little work. it seemed interesting, but not that much different than using adaptive filters for signal processing. that seemed to be the general consensus, that there wasn't a lot of of interesting behavior or depth there. the number of weights and sizes of super computers at the time were a good 3-4 decimal orders of magnitude lower than what's being thrown today.
so unless the military ran a giant expensive program just to hide the fact that they actually had machines 10000x faster than the $50M (in 80s money) supercomputers of the day, and had trained them on a corpus they whipped up out of nowhere (the amount of information on the internet at the time could probably have fit on a few of todays phones), it probably didn't happen.