A Principled Approach to Quantum Technology: The Stanford RQT Framework and Its Ten Principles
By Editor
Stanford, CA, June 11, 2025—Mauritz Kop, Founder of the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology (Stanford RQT), has posted A Principled Approach to Quantum Technologies as a preprint on SSRN — a framework overview that connects the field's recent hardware breakthroughs to a structured governance answer: the Stanford RQT framework and its Ten Principles for Responsible Quantum Innovation. The paper's premise is that quantum technology has arrived at an inflection point where capability is outpacing governance, and that the gap should be closed not by waiting for comprehensive regulation but by a principled, self-regulatory approach in the interim. It builds directly on the operational core set out in the Ten Principles for Responsible Quantum Innovation published in IOP Quantum Science and Technology.
A principled approach to quantum technology — the Stanford RQT framework and its ten principles (illustrative editorial image).
A hardware moment, surveyed
The paper opens with a survey of the 2024–2025 hardware wave, and it is careful with the specifics. Google's Willow—a 105-qubit superconducting transmon chip announced in December 2024—is described as the first processor to demonstrate that increasing the number of encoded qubits can exponentially reduce error rates, crossing a below-threshold milestone that had eluded the field for over thirty years. IBM's roadmap is traced through the 1,121-qubit Condor and the lower-error 133-qubit Heron that anchors its modular System Two. D-Wave's annealing line reaches a 4,400-plus-qubit Advantage2, and in March 2025 the company claimed quantum computational supremacy on a real-world materials-simulation problem. Quantinuum's trapped-ion System Model H2 and its Microsoft collaboration are cited for progress on logical qubits—4 logical qubits from 30 physical in April 2024, scaling to 12 by September—while Microsoft's February 2025 Majorana 1 topological-qubit chip is presented honestly as a scientific advance whose practical scaling "remains an ongoing research and engineering challenge."
The point of the survey is not the leaderboard but the trajectory. These chips, Kop writes, "embody a broader strategy of iterative hardware upgrades" that moves the industry toward practical, reliable, large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computing—with downstream potential to revolutionize healthcare, finance, energy, and defense, and to boost general-purpose technologies including agentic AI, biotechnology, and nuclear fusion. Capability across computing, simulation, sensing, networking, and quantum/AI hybrids is rising together, which is precisely what makes the governance question urgent.
Quantum-ELSPI and the dual-use problem
The governance frame is Quantum-ELSPI—the ethical, legal, socio-economic, and policy implications of quantum technology, a field Kop helped name. Like semiconductors, AI, nanotechnology, and synthetic biology before it, quantum raises interrelated concerns: technological justice (ensuring equitable access so that all of humankind can benefit), and above all dual use—the same capability that yields new vaccines or catalysts through quantum simulation could enable biological or chemical weapons, and miniaturized quantum sensors that serve environmental goals could be repurposed for pervasive surveillance. The paper draws an explicit lesson from nuclear technology: society justifies continued use on medical and energy grounds while having "done little to address" the destructive extreme—an asymmetry quantum governance should not repeat.
The physics is not decorative here; it is the reason the law must be bespoke. Second-generation quantum technologies are unique, the paper notes, because they directly harness superposition, entanglement, and tunneling to achieve quantitative gains in speed and fidelity and qualitative gains in novel functionality over classical systems. A central concrete risk follows from the same physics: a sufficiently capable quantum computer could break current cryptographic protocols, which is why the paper stresses preparing cybersecurity infrastructure for "Q-day"—described in the paper as the day when "current RSA and AES encryption fails"—through post-quantum cryptography, quantum key distribution, and the adoption of NIST quantum-resistant standards.
The RQT framework and its Ten Principles
The constructive core is Responsible Quantum Technology (RQT): a framework, in the paper's words, "designed to ensure research and innovation efforts align with societal demands and enhance planetary welfare," operationalized through a tailored set of principles that optimize risk-benefit curves. RQT marries Quantum-ELSPI considerations with the four dimensions of Responsible Research and Innovation—anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion, and responsiveness—and it insists that quantum methods be developed in ways that account for the counter-intuitive quantum-mechanical phenomena that make the technology distinctive in the first place.
That framework is operationalized through the Ten Principles for Responsible Quantum Innovation, organized into three functional categories under the banner of safeguarding, engaging, and advancing (SEA) quantum technologies, society, and humankind. The organizing insight, Kop argues, "is to safeguard society through advancing quantum technology, taking a responsible, pro-innovation stance." The principles are pitched at two audiences at once: policymakers designing regulatory interventions, who can use the SEA structure to avoid counterproductive measures such as supply-chain-choking export controls; and developers, vendors, and end-users, who can use them as a readiness baseline. The same case for an interdisciplinary, standards-anchored route runs through Kop's standards-first vision for quantum governance in Science.
Anticipation, balance, and the Collingridge dilemma
A recurring methodological theme is timing. The paper frames quantum regulation as "a balancing act between underregulation and overregulation," and invokes the Collingridge dilemma: act too soon and you may stifle desirable innovation externalities; act too late and the technology becomes locked in, with unwanted path dependencies entrenched. Its preferred resolution is anticipatory governance—technology forecasting, horizon scanning, scenario planning, and impact assessment—deployed to guide quantum's integration into society "before it becomes irreversibly entrenched." This is the same precautionary logic that runs through Kop's wider corpus, applied here with a quantum-specific edge.
The substantive yardsticks are equally explicit. RQT should abide by legal norms such as the rule of law, proportionality, and subsidiarity; future legislation should mitigate quantum-specific risks and maximize benefits while affording legal certainty and incentivizing responsible quantum innovation. On the socio-economic axis the paper invokes sociotechnical acceptability and post-Rawlsian distribution—quantum's burdens and gains, it argues, should be equitably distributed across members of society, with priority to society's most pressing goals: cybersecurity, economic stability, equality of opportunity, affordable healthcare, and managing climate change. Policy, in turn, should treat quantum "as something unique and unprecedented" while still learning from closely related fields—AI, semiconductors, nanotechnology, biotechnology, extended reality, nuclear technology, the internet, and social media—building on their successes and noting their mistakes.
Self-regulation in a regulatory vacuum
The paper is candid that the field sits in a governance gap. Quantum's advance "currently outpaces the establishment of a coherent global governance framework," and lacks unified interoperability standards, certification, performance benchmarking, verification, and quantum-ready quality-management systems. Absent comprehensive formal regulation beyond national security and export controls, the recommended posture is self-regulation: stakeholders should leverage quantum-technology-assessment tools to monitor, validate, and audit quantum applications across their life cycle, using appropriate RQT benchmarking and verification metrics. The argument carries a commercial edge that is unusual for a governance paper and stated plainly: a principled approach yields "competitive first mover advantages" against future compliance and market-entrance requirements, even as it supports safe, equitable deployment—a theme also developed in the call for responsible quantum technology in Nature Physics.
As open as possible, as closed as necessary
The closing argument turns geopolitical. The paper warns against isolating fundamental quantum-physics research along national lines, and against nativist export controls that throttle critical-mineral and quantum-device supply chains and risk a "quantum splinternet." Its governing maxim is that quantum research and development should be kept "as open as possible, and as closed as necessary"—open in fundamental physics, standardization, and the early phases of second-generation development; closed where genuine security, competition, and resilience risks demand it. Toward that end the paper sketches bespoke, pluralistic innovation mechanisms—articulated antitrust enforcement, collaborative IP structures, fair-trade conditions, and quantum treaties supporting essential-facility access and compulsory licensing—to democratize foundational knowledge for Majority World countries and to prevent winner-takes-all dynamics. Set against the broader field of the ethical, legal, social and policy implications of quantum technology, the message is consistent with the rest of the RQT program: navigate the current regulatory vacuum deliberately, with values-based principles rather than either laissez-faire drift or premature moratoria.
Last updated: June 7, 2026.