Mauritz Kop Hosts a Quantum Policy Delegation from Thailand at Stanford Law School (Spring 2024)
By our Editor
From 2023 through 2025, while Mauritz Kop served as its founding director, the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology (Stanford RQT) regularly served as a port of call for governments thinking through their national quantum strategies. Among its international visitors, in the spring of 2024, was a delegation from Thailand, hosted by Mauritz Kop at Stanford Law School for an exchange on quantum policy, governance, and ecosystem building.
The visit fit a pattern. Ministries, science agencies, and university leaders drafting quantum roadmaps sought out the Center for a working session, the same format in which Mauritz Kop and Mark Lemley hosted the Canadian quantum governance delegation that came to Stanford to help inform Canada's G7 presidency.
Stanford Law School hosted a delegation from Thailand for a working session on quantum policy and governance.
What visiting delegations came to Stanford for: a method for governing quantum technology
National quantum strategies confront the same checklist everywhere: how to grow research capacity and retain talent, how to balance scientific openness against research security, when to begin the migration to quantum-resistant cryptography, and how to write rules that attract investment. What Stanford shared was a method: risk-based thinking, standards-first sequencing, and the ELSPI lens that reads every application of quantum technology through its ethical, legal, socio-economic, and policy implications.
That method deliberately treats quantum computing, quantum sensing, and quantum communication as one policy field alongside AI, because in practice quantum capabilities will arrive intertwined with artificial intelligence, in hybrid systems whose governance cannot be split into separate silos. Multilateral reference points already exist for that conversation, notably the World Economic Forum's quantum computing governance principles.
Why Southeast Asia's quantum posture is being decided now
Thailand's interest reflects a wider truth: quantum research and industrial capability are developing well beyond the United States and China. In the quantum century, middle powers that invest early in talent, specialized applications, and governance readiness can influence the regional standards, supply chains, and norms that larger players must later negotiate with. For Southeast Asia, that means the region's quantum posture is being decided now, in choices about curricula, procurement, standards participation, and international partnerships.
Conversations like this one are where that positioning starts. The Thai visit sits alongside other calls at the Center, including those by the Dutch ambassador to the United States and by Princeton's Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination. Different flags, same underlying question: how does a country of our size play this hand well?
Middle powers that invest early in governance readiness can influence the quantum standards and partnerships of their region.
Why quantum diplomacy happens in seminar rooms before it reaches summits
Most quantum diplomacy takes place in seminar rooms, between the people who will draft the strategies their ministries later sign. Hosting such exchanges formed a substantial part of the Center's work during Kop's tenure, and often the part that traveled farthest.
For policymakers, the takeaway is to build the relationships before the technology forces the issue. The least expensive instrument of quantum statecraft is a standing invitation to talk, extended early, across borders, and at working level.
Mauritz Kop Hosts a Quantum Policy Delegation from Thailand at Stanford Law School (Spring 2024)
Last updated: September 3, 2026