Mauritz Kop Teaches Quantum Governance at the United States Air Force Academy

By Editor

Colorado Springs, CO, October 23, 2025—Mauritz Kop, Founder of the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology (Stanford RQT), returned to the United States Air Force Academy, where he serves as guest professor, to teach a class of cadets on the governance of quantum technology. The lecture, titled Responsible Quantum Technology: Establishing a Legal-Ethical Framework, addressed an audience with a strong grounding in quantum theory and computing basics—including the DiVincenzo criteria for a viable quantum computer—and moved from that technical foundation to the geostrategic, legal, and ethical architecture the field will need as it matures.

A lecture-hall horizon merging into an entangled-qubit lattice over a stylized Rocky Mountain skyline and angular academy architecture.

The second quantum revolution, on its own terms

The session opened not with policy but with physics, because the governance questions follow from the mechanics. Classical digital systems encode information in definite bits—0 or 1. Quantum systems instead exploit superposition, in which a qubit occupies a weighted combination of states until measured; entanglement, in which the measurement statistics of two particles remain correlated regardless of the distance between them; and tunneling, in which a particle crosses an energy barrier that classical mechanics forbids. These are not faster versions of familiar operations. They are qualitatively new functionalities, and they are why quantum technology opens whole categories of capability that classical engineering cannot reach.

That is the substance of what Kop framed for the cadets as the second quantum revolution: a shift from understanding quantum mechanics to deliberately harnessing it across four domains—quantum computing, sensing, simulation, and networking. The applications he surveyed span the civilian and the strategic: accelerating drug discovery and the design of novel materials, enhancing artificial intelligence, building navigation that does not depend on jammable satellite signals for environments where satellite positioning fails, optimizing complex logistics, and constructing communication channels whose security is grounded in physical law given sound implementation. These capabilities draw on those physical effects, combined with engineering and classical infrastructure, rather than on incremental improvement of existing hardware.

Why the physics resists classical law

The lecture's central legal claim is that the same properties that make quantum technology powerful also strain the assumptions embedded in existing legal infrastructure. Much of the law presupposes factual certainty, localized effects, and linear causality. Quantum reality is, by contrast, probabilistic, non-local, and entangled. As Kop put it to the cadets, this raises questions our current doctrines were not built to answer: "How do we assign liability for probabilistic outcomes? Establish jurisdiction for non-local effects? Prove causation in complex quantum systems?" The mismatch is the argument for a sui generis—a tailored rather than borrowed—approach to governance, instead of patching quantum applications onto frameworks designed for deterministic technologies.

United States Air Force Academy, usafa.edu, 2026.

Two reading questions, one framework

The class was organized around two questions the cadets had prepared in advance: why regulate quantum before the technology is fully mature, and what kind of framework best balances innovation against risk. On the first, Kop drew on the Collingridge dilemma—control is easiest early, when knowledge is limited but options remain open—and on his own metaphor of a quantum event horizon, a threshold beyond which technological lock-in makes the path far harder to change. Acting while the technology is still malleable, he argued, is not a brake on innovation but a precondition for steering it.

On the second, he presented an integrated two-pillar framework: agile, risk-based regulation paired with a strategic industrial and security policy. The regulatory pillar tiers obligations by the severity of an application's risk—learning from the EU AI Act's pyramid of criticality—and concentrates oversight where it matters: rigorous pre-market assessment, mandatory post-quantum cryptography, human oversight, and continuous monitoring for high-risk systems. The industrial pillar builds the national capacity to compete responsibly: sustained funding across the lab-to-market pipeline, supply-chain resilience for critical minerals and components, talent development, and shared research infrastructure. This is the operational shape of the Responsible Quantum Technology framework Kop and colleagues set out in their Ten Principles for Responsible Quantum Innovation, organized under the SEA framework—safeguarding, engaging, and advancing the technology, and pressure-tested at the second Stanford Responsible Quantum Technology Conference.

Dual-use, deterrence, and the alliance dimension

For an audience of future Air Force and Space Force officers, the dual-use character of quantum technology was the connecting thread. The same quantum simulation that designs a life-saving drug could model a dangerous pathogen; the same sensor that guides a medical device could guide a weapon. The most acute near-term concern is "Q-Day"—the point at which a sufficiently capable quantum computer could break today's standard public-key encryption—made urgent by "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later," in which adversaries collect encrypted data now to decrypt once the hardware exists. That threat makes the migration to post-quantum cryptography a present-tense security task, not a future one, a case Kop has developed in his War on the Rocks analysis calling for a Bletchley Park for the quantum age.

The strategic frame is great-power competition. Mastery of transformative technologies has historically tracked global influence, and the race for quantum advantage is bound up with the contest between democratic and authoritarian governance models. Kop's response is not technological retreat but deliberate stewardship: embedding democratic values into standards and architecture early, protecting high-value research from state-sponsored intellectual-property theft, and building robust cooperation with like-minded allies—the same posture he has brought to forums such as the University of Oxford and the Hoover Institution. Investment in certain dual-use capabilities—secure communications, advanced sensing, optimization—he framed as a responsible component of deterrence and alliance contribution rather than a contradiction of responsible-innovation goals.

A responsibility for future leaders

The lecture closed on the theme that runs through Kop's work and that he pressed on the cadets directly: technological momentum may feel inexorable, but its trajectory is a matter of choice. Understanding the intersecting technical, strategic, legal, and ethical dimensions of quantum technology, he argued, is a core professional responsibility for the officers who will adopt and shape these systems within the Department of Defense and beyond. The returning engagement extends the Academy's Law and Emerging Technology teaching that Kop began as guest professor in 2024, carrying the Responsible Quantum Technology framework to the next cohort of cadets entering a field whose rules are still being written.

Last updated: June 5, 2026.