Quantum ELSA and ELSPI in North America: Mauritz Kop Co-Authors a UNESCO International Year of Quantum Book Chapter

By our Editor

In June 2024, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 2025 the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ), with UNESCO as lead agency, marking one hundred years since the birth of quantum mechanics. Beyond celebrating a century of quantum science, the Year posed a forward question: how should societies govern the quantum century? As part of the scholarly program surrounding the Year, Mauritz Kop co-authored the chapter ELSA of Quantum Technologies in North America, prepared for a volume in the scholarly program of the International Year, on the ethical, legal, and social aspects (ELSA) and the broader ethical, legal, social, and policy implications (ELSPI) of quantum technologies in the United States and Canada. The chapter extends the agenda he opened as speaker at the United Nations International Year of Quantum.

Quantum ELSA and ELSPI in North America: the chapter written for the UNESCO-led International Year of Quantum.

How Quantum ELSPI grew from a research field into policy practice

Quantum ELSPI began as a scholarly proposition: quantum technology needs its own dedicated study of ethical, legal, social, and policy implications, distinct from generic tech ethics. Introduced in Digital Society (Springer Nature, 2023) and permanently archived at the Stanford Law Library, the field treats quantum governance as inseparable from standards, procurement, market structure, intellectual property, and security policy. The new chapter shows that lens at work on a full region.

What the chapter argues about the US and Canadian quantum ecosystems

Written with quantum physicist Shohini Ghose (Wilfrid Laurier University and the Quantum Algorithms Institute), Lindsay Rand (University of California, Berkeley), Bruna Shinohara de Mendonça, and Karl Thibault, the chapter grew out of the IYQ regional ELSA workshop for North America, held online on October 31, 2025, at which Kop was one of the main speakers, as reported in our account of the workshop. Its starting point: the United States and Canada form a leading locus of quantum technology research and early deployment, and the region's structure shapes its governance agenda.

Three arguments stand out. First, the North American quantum market is strongly platformized. Access to quantum computing, tooling, and benchmarking usually runs through cloud providers and proprietary stacks, which turns competition policy, interoperability, and procurement into governance levers. Second, the migration to post-quantum cryptography dominates near-term priorities, because a future fault-tolerant quantum computer running Shor's algorithm could break the widely used RSA and elliptic-curve public-key cryptography behind today's key establishment and digital signatures, and "harvest now, decrypt later" collection makes that tomorrow-problem a today-problem. Third, quantum governance in the region will materialize as a patchwork of sectoral rules, standards, funding conditions, and procurement practices, with no single comprehensive quantum statute in sight.

The through-line is an execution-oriented view of ethics. As with AI before it, responsible innovation counts when it becomes repeatable controls, documentation, and assurance practices that can be audited across the technology lifecycle. The chapter emphasizes controls, documentation, and assurance practices that organizations can implement and audit.

One century of quantum mechanics, one continental governance agenda: the ELSPI lens on North America's quantum ecosystem.

How Stanford, Ottawa, and Washington translate ELSPI into institutions

The chapter also maps how that translation is already happening: the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology (Stanford RQT), during Kop's 2023 to 2025 tenure as founding director, as an academic contributor; Canada's deliberate national coordination and expert-panel work, including the Canadian quantum governance delegation hosted at Stanford; and a more heterogeneous, market-driven U.S. policy environment shaped by cybersecurity urgency and competition over critical technologies. The comparative lesson: ELSPI uptake travels fastest where scientific institutions and policy institutions share personnel and vocabulary.

Why the UNESCO-led International Year gives the chapter its reach

Anchoring this scholarship in the UNESCO-led International Year places it in a deliberately global, inclusive register: quantum capability is arriving unevenly, and the norms set by early movers will bind everyone else. An IYQ-framed volume is one of the few venues where that asymmetry is the explicit subject.

For policymakers, the chapter's message is concrete: the highest-leverage quantum decisions of the next five years will be taken in standards bodies, procurement offices, and cryptographic migration plans. Govern there first, and the statute books can follow.

Last updated: September 3, 2026