I agree. The companies want to release their models that are just ahead of the competition while working on UX based vendor lockin. They can buffer model releases if everyone is slowing down (releases are hard and expensive!) and then do more foundational-but-not-ready-to-apply research while continuing on he funding, valuation, addition, and revenue pushes.

I read the whole thing as coordinated behavior to reduce the breakneck pace of 2026.