OpenAI launched its GPT‑5.6 family — Sol, Terra, Luna — but, at the administration's request, only to about 20 approved partners, with broad release pushed to “the coming weeks” (Axios). A day later, Commerce cleared Anthropic's Mythos 5 for limited redeployment to cyber defenders and infrastructure providers; sibling model Fable stays restricted (Fortune). AEC angle — the model under your copilot or BIM assistant is now a regulated input Washington can switch on or off. Build for portability, not lock‑in.

The DOE issued a conditional $17.5B loan for long‑lead parts on 10 AP1000 reactors, aimed squarely at data‑center demand. Walmart signed its first nuclear PPA — 176 MW from Constellation's Dresden plant; SMR startups reached first criticality in Idaho; and Chevron–Microsoft's 2.67‑GW behind‑the‑meter gas plant advanced in West Texas. AEC angle — power is now a site‑selection, schedule, and design variable for the sector's dominant build type. Nuclear's long‑lead supply chain is the new bottleneck to watch.

Google capped Meta's access to its Gemini models after it couldn't meet Meta's compute request, the FT reported — delaying some of Meta's internal AI projects and pushing staff to ration tokens (Reuters/CNA). Other Google Cloud clients were squeezed too; the unit's backlog nearly doubled in a quarter (The Information). AEC angle — the AI capacity vendors promise sits behind a hard compute ceiling, and small firms sit furthest back. Don't design a workflow that assumes unlimited, guaranteed access.

ByteDance and Renmin University released iLLaDA, an 8B model trained from scratch that matches Qwen2.5‑7B at the base level, joining Google DeepMind's faster DiffusionGemma (The Decoder). Rather than writing one token at a time, these models refine whole passages in parallel — trading some quality for speed. AEC angle — low‑latency local models are the substrate for on‑device field AI that reads specs and drafts notes without sending project data to the cloud. Promising for data sovereignty; not yet quality‑critical.