An LSI Test for Securing the Quantum Industrial Commons

By AIRecht Editor

Stanford, CA, February 12, 2026—Mauritz Kop, Founder of the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology and a Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), has posted as a preprint a book-length Article on the strategic intersection of quantum technology, intellectual property, and national security. Titled The Nexus of Quantum Technology, Intellectual Property, and National Security: Deterrence by Denial for Democratic Resilience: An LSI Test for Securing the Quantum Industrial Commons, the work argues that the United States and its allies should pursue not closure and not laissez-faire openness, but a disciplined middle path. The argument extends the research-security agenda Kop set out when he spoke at the CNAS quantum roundtable on research security, technology theft, and intellectual property rights, and turns it into an administrable governance test.

Quantum technology, intellectual property and national security — securing the quantum industrial commons (illustrative editorial image).

A probabilistic world and the approaching "event horizon"

The Article opens with an unusual interdisciplinary framing: it reads grand strategy through the ontology of quantum mechanics. A quantum state is not a single predetermined outcome but a map over possible futures, encoded in complex amplitudes whose squared magnitudes give the probabilities, and held in superposition until a measurement collapses it into one observable result. Geopolitics in the quantum era, the Article contends, shares that structure—policymakers cannot forecast a single trajectory for fault-tolerant qubits, scaled quantum sensors, or entanglement distribution across quantum networks, so they must prepare for several plausible "eigenstates" of capability and rivalry. The metaphor is deployed carefully rather than decoratively: the Article uses quantum probability as an analogy for strategic uncertainty—not a claim that geopolitics is literally quantum—to argue that scenario methods which stay robust across divergent paths are the rational response. To that end the Article uses the Sullivan–Feldman "Eight Worlds" uncertainty framework, which forces governance to remain resilient whichever future materializes.

Kop situates the analysis against an approaching strategic "event horizon." He points to recent U.S. assessments—including the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission's call for a "Quantum First by 2030" posture, and parallel White House initiatives aimed at securing critical inputs and accelerating trusted innovation. The Article notes that Commission research documents China's centrally mobilized quantum program under military-civil fusion, and that its most consequential advantages may arise not only from computing milestones but also from sensing and cryptanalytic applications. A similar time-compression dynamic is visible in frontier artificial intelligence, where discontinuous capability gains can outpace post-hoc governance; quantum-AI convergence can shorten quantum engineering cycles, and thus threat horizons, while quantum-safe migration, verification, and measurement discipline help mitigate AI-enabled risk. The conclusion the Article draws is that strategic stability is most affected through sensing, positioning-navigation-and-timing, communications, and cryptanalysis—and that, the Article argues, a less escalatory answer is deterrence by denial rather than offensive threat.

Values-based deterrence by denial and the quantum industrial commons

The Article's organizing concept is responsible quantum technology (RQT) reframed as values-based deterrence by denial: a legal, ethical, and institutional control plane that protects the shared "quantum industrial commons"—the talent, tooling, standards, supply chains, and research base on which an open ecosystem depends—against authoritarian appropriation and exploitation. Deterrence by denial seeks to make hostile gains too costly or slow to be worthwhile, rather than relying on the threat of retaliation. The Article illustrates the posture with a Taiwan invasion-denial vignette, arguing that denial preserves crisis stability while still withholding adversarial advantage. The aim throughout is democratic resilience: keeping the commons open enough to sustain innovation and standards leadership, while closing precisely the control points where leakage would be strategically decisive.

The LSI test: least-trade-restrictive, security-sufficient, innovation-preserving

The central contribution is the LSI test: a governance screen that disciplines both state and private action by asking whether a measure is least-trade-restrictive, security-sufficient, and innovation-preserving. The test is designed to steer between two failure modes the Article names directly—over-securitization, which chills publication, standards leadership, and venture formation, and under-securitization, which leaks crown-jewel capabilities that are slow to reacquire. LSI is applied across the full quantum stack: computing, sensing, simulation, networking, communication, quantum-AI hybrids, and the enabling inputs and materials beneath them. It is also applied to the stack's upstream dependencies—patent and trade-secret doctrine (where incentives must accelerate innovation without swinging between stifling patent thickets and opaque secrecy), government-funded IP and data rights, calibrated secrecy orders, dual-use export controls and investment screening, and cryptographic baselines including post-quantum cryptography, crypto-agility, and quantum-network interoperability. The Article aligns its framework with the 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy, treating supply chains and cloud platforms as entangled governance nodes, with chokepoints in cryogenics, isotopes, lasers, and detector-grade materials on the physical front and identity, access control, logging, and auditability on the digital front.

IP doctrine as a control point, not an afterthought

One of the Article's distinctive moves is to treat intellectual property as a front-line instrument of national power rather than a back-office concern. It maps the architecture of IP in the knowledge economy—patents and the enablement requirement, trade secrets and data, copyright and interfaces, government-funded IP and data rights, secrecy orders, and standards-essential positions—and then asks, for each, how the LSI test should calibrate disclosure against denial. The recurring tension is the "dilemma of patent disclosure": a patent application signals capability to competitors and adversaries, while trade-secret protection keeps know-how dark but forecloses the cumulative, standards-based innovation an open ecosystem depends on. The Article reads this against a longer history it calls the "unwritten doctrine of power"—the way rising states have historically used lawful imitation, emergency powers, and state-engineered diffusion to appropriate frontier technology—and it draws governance blueprints from earlier revolutions in nuclear technology, nanotechnology, the internet, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology. The lesson Kop extracts is that IP design is itself a security choice, and that calibrated secrecy orders, compulsory mechanisms, and government-rights carve-outs (including DARPA-style arrangements) belong inside the same control plane as export controls and investment screening.

A pillarized stack and a comparative read of global strategies

Because the quantum stack is heterogeneous, the Article resists one-size-fits-all rules. It builds a "pillarized" taxonomy and maturity map—computing, sensing, simulation, networking, communication, quantum-AI hybrids, and enabling inputs—and assigns differentiated governance, conformity, and verification expectations to each, recognizing that a near-term sensing capability and a still-distant fault-tolerant computer pose very different leakage risks and therefore warrant very different guardrails. On that foundation it offers a comparative analysis of national innovation systems, reading the United States, the European Union, China, Canada, and an array of middle powers and allied architectures through the same LSI lens. The comparative chapter includes what the Article calls a "Canada middle-power paradox," and it closes the loop with a practitioner's maturity-governance matrix and an LSI audit. The effect is to give the abstract test something to bite on: a concrete way to decide, pillar by pillar and jurisdiction by jurisdiction, where openness remains affordable and where denial should be the default.

Instruments, a coalition playbook, and the risk of a "Silicon Curtain"

The LSI test is not left abstract. The Article integrates emerging instruments of economic statecraft—a strategic critical-minerals reserve, a Quantum Criticality Index for prioritizing quantum-decisive inputs, the relevant critical-minerals executive action, and a "closed-loop enclave" architecture for high-sensitivity collaborative research and development. It offers what Kop describes as an implementable coalition playbook: administrable, empirically anchored criteria, templates, and differentiated guardrails, including red-zone domains where denial is the default. The Article's closing warning is that mishandled securitization risks a self-defeating "Silicon Curtain" that would isolate allied innovators from one another. The constructive alternative it advances is "security-sufficient openness," with standards-first interoperability treated as a stabilizing eigenstate of the international order—an approach continuous with the standards-first governance argument Kop and colleagues made in Science, and with his longer-running work on intellectual property and market power in quantum computing.

The Article has been posted as a preprint on arXiv (arXiv:2602.15051), indexed under Physics and Society, History and Philosophy of Physics, and Quantum Physics; readers should treat it as a working preprint rather than a peer-reviewed publication. A shorter companion announcement of the preprint is also available. For boards, founders, and policymakers, its practical value is the LSI test itself: a repeatable way to ask, of any proposed control, whether it is the least restrictive measure that is still security-sufficient and that still preserves the innovation it is meant to protect. The full author profile and related work are available on the Mauritz Kop scholar profile.

Last updated: June 7, 2026.

The Nexus paper blog as posted on AIRecht.