Why the US Energy Department Added Helium to Its Critical Material List on 27 October 2026, and Where Quantum Computing Appears in 91 FR 67558
What the Department of Energy published on 27 October 2026
The US Department of Energy added helium to its Critical Material List in a notice published in the Federal Register on 27 October 2026 as 91 FR 67558. Assistant Secretary Audrey Robertson of the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation signed it on 21 October. The legal basis is section 7002(a)(2) of the Energy Act of 2020, which lets the Secretary of Energy name materials with a high supply-chain risk that serve an essential function in energy technologies. The notice has no comment period. Helium joins the 18 critical materials for energy on the 2023 list and metallurgical coal, added in May 2025.
Where quantum computing appears in the helium notice
The summary calls helium non-substitutable for semiconductor manufacturing, leak testing of natural gas infrastructure and quantum computing, and essential to medical and scientific uses. The justification in the body rests on chips and AI infrastructure. Quantum computing is named once and is not developed further.
Why the notice matters for dilution refrigerators and helium-3
Superconducting and most spin-qubit processors run inside dilution refrigerators that circulate a mixture of helium-3 and helium-4. The designation covers helium without qualification, yet the notice contains no isotope-specific analysis, and helium-3 supply follows its own route: DOE's helium-3 is a byproduct of tritium processing at the Savannah River Site, sold through the DOE Isotope Program. What the designation does for the cold end of the quantum stack depends on what DOE publishes next.
The SEC's Fiscal Year 2027 Examination Priorities List Quantum Computing Under Regulation SCI: What the 23 October 2026 Sentence Means for Exchanges and Clearing Agencies
What the SEC published on 23 October 2026
On 23 October 2026 the US Securities and Exchange Commission released the Division of Examinations' priorities for fiscal year 2027. In the section on Regulation Systems Compliance and Integrity, the rule that governs the core technology of exchanges, clearing agencies, FINRA and a few other market utilities, the Division says its examinations "will focus on emerging trends, including SI, tokenization of securities, extended trading hours, and quantum computing." Neither the fiscal 2025 nor the fiscal 2026 priorities mentioned quantum computing at all.
What the Regulation SCI sentence requires of exchanges and clearing agencies
Several outlets reported that the SEC is now targeting quantum computing. The document is narrower. It names no algorithm, sets no migration date and asks for no inventory, and its own disclaimer says it is a staff statement with no legal force. The weight comes from the rule it sits under. Regulation SCI already requires each covered entity to keep written policies that give its systems adequate security, and to review and test those systems for vulnerabilities to internal and external threats. An examiner who asks how a clearing agency is preparing for post-quantum cryptography can now point to a published priority when asking. This post compares what was reported with what the text says, and asks what an SCI entity can expect to be asked in the coming fiscal year.
Claude Mythos 5 Helped Design a Quantum Circuit for Bitcoin's secp256k1 Curve: What arXiv 2610.22367's '17-Fold Fewer Gates' Is Measured Against
What Harvard and Anthropic posted on 15 October 2026
Andi Gu, Alek Kemeny, Susanne Yelin and Mikhail Lukin posted arXiv 2610.22367, "Discovering state-of-the-art quantum circuits with large language models," on 15 October 2026. The paper uses Claude Mythos 5 to propose circuit designs and an independent evaluator to test and score them across eight tasks. Anthropic presented the work on 16 October. The result that drew attention is a reversible point adder over the prime field of secp256k1, the curve behind Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures. The authors' public repository lists it at 4,006,673 Toffoli gates and 935 logical qubits, and press coverage reported about 17-fold fewer Toffoli gates for 12% more qubits.
What the 17-fold figure is measured against
The comparator is the authors' own reconstruction of a 2026 point adder by Luo and colleagues, at 69,529,757 Toffoli gates and 838 qubits. The same repository cites a second published design, by Schrottenloher, at about 1.9 million Toffoli gates and 1,446 qubits. Against that design the new circuit uses more gates and about a third fewer qubits. The repository's implemented circuits were evaluated by a grader that runs 100,000 tests and passes a circuit with up to 20 failures, a budget the authors set so that deliberately approximate arithmetic is allowed; the Schrottenloher figures are cited there, not reproduced. This post sets each claim beside the paper and repository, explains what a cheaper adder means for elliptic-curve cryptography, and shows where the figure is commonly overstated.