If I were IBM management, I'd be getting a laugh out of all of this. When IBM had to scale back their ambitions for Watson, especially those related to automating medical diagnoses, they were roundly mocked. Do not ask, dear tech companies, for whom the bell of AI overpromising tolls - it tolls for thee!
It does seem a little weird, yeah. I mean, the researchers are from Drexel University. I would've figured that the applications that they would be most interested in would be fast optical switching and MEMS devices - whereas in this press release it seems like they're trying to "sex" up the findings by suggesting that they can be used to make a Romulan cloaking device for macroscopic antennas.
This article might have suffered at the hands of an overenthusiastic PR team.