AI Fabrics, Quantum-Safe Tunnels, and Cloud Policy April was the month I stopped trusting product announcements at face value. Every major vendor pushed something with "AI" or "quantum-safe" stamped on it, and almost every one of them deserved a closer look at what actually changes in the data plane when an engineer tries to deploy it. The themes were not abstract — they showed up in places where someone is going to have to debug them. Data centers are bending under AI workloads in ways that break old cabling and cooling assumptions. Cloud networks are quietly becoming policy machines, where the interesting failures are now IAM-shaped instead of route-shaped. Routing security keeps grinding forward in small RPKI and registry improvements that almost nobody celebrates. VPNs and firewalls are starting their long migration to post-quantum cryptography, which is going to be messier than the hybrid press releases suggest.…