Innovation, Quantum-AI Technology & Law

Blog over Kunstmatige Intelligentie, Quantum, Deep Learning, Blockchain en Big Data Law

Blog over juridische, sociale, ethische en policy aspecten van Kunstmatige Intelligentie, Quantum Computing, Sensing & Communication, Augmented Reality en Robotica, Big Data Wetgeving en Machine Learning Regelgeving. Kennisartikelen inzake de EU AI Act, de Data Governance Act, cloud computing, algoritmes, privacy, virtual reality, blockchain, robotlaw, smart contracts, informatierecht, ICT contracten, online platforms, apps en tools. Europese regels, auteursrecht, chipsrecht, databankrechten en juridische diensten AI recht.

Berichten in Academics
Katie Liu and Mauritz Kop Play as House Pianists at the Stanford Law Neukom Terrace Opening (Spring 2024)

Institutions reveal themselves in their ceremonies. When Stanford Law School opened a new terrace at the William H. Neukom Building in the spring of 2024, it turned to two members of its own quantum-governance community for the music, and the result says something about how interdisciplinary culture actually gets built. The scene was modest by design, a piano, a terrace, an audience of colleagues, and for that reason it repays a closer look.

Who played: two quantum-policy collaborators who are also trained musicians

Katie Liu and Mauritz Kop collaborate by day on quantum law and policy within the Stanford responsible-quantum orbit, the same circle whose research and conferences this blog has chronicled for years. Both are also serious musicians. Kop's published work includes music law, and his training in music preceded his Stanford fellowship; Liu is a Stanford student who pairs computer science with music. House-pianist duty at a terrace opening brought the two registers of their collaboration, analytical and expressive, onto one stage.

Why a law school working on quantum and AI benefits from a piano

The best argument is practical. Fields like quantum technology and artificial intelligence demand collaboration across physics, law, computer science, and ethics, and that collaboration runs on trust formed in informal settings. Shared music-making is among the oldest trust technologies humans have. The musical thread in this community surfaced earlier in the live quantum-art demonstration at TUM's Festival of Ideas, where art and science shared a single stage.

How the Neukom Building was designed for gatherings like this one

The William H. Neukom Building was designed around gathering: a courtyard, an elevated garden, and connecting bridges, a piece of campus architecture that treats community as infrastructure. Its wings pinwheel around the garden, its bridges are glass, and the whole composition assumes that people who see each other will talk to each other. A terrace opening scored by two resident pianists is that design philosophy in use.

The full post tells the story of the opening, the pianists' double lives between quantum governance and repertoire, and why this blog treats such moments as evidence of a research community's character.

Meer lezen
Prof. Mauritz Kop Invited to Speak at Quantum Innovation 2026 in Nagoya on Responsible Quantum Innovation and the Post-Quantum Transition

Prof. Mauritz Kop has been invited to speak at Quantum Innovation 2026, the International Symposium on Quantum Science, Technology and Innovation, held from December 8 to 11, 2026 at WINC AICHI in Nagoya. The symposium is organized by Japan's Quantum Technology Innovation Hubs with the support of the Government of Japan and JST. Kop closes the session on Practical Quantum Computing on December 8 with a talk on the legal and governance side of quantum security, titled Before Q-Day: Responsible Quantum Innovation, Standards, and the Post-Quantum Transition.

Japan's National Quantum Symposium Comes to Nagoya

Co-organized by Japan's Cabinet Office, three ministries, JST, RIKEN, AIST, NICT, Q-STAR, and leading universities, and sponsored by Fujitsu, Toyota, Toshiba, and Hitachi, the symposium covers quantum computing, sensing, and cryptography over four days, with a closing day on Japan's Moonshot goal of a fault-tolerant quantum computer. The program spans quantum computing, the post-quantum transition, and quantum networks. Keynotes come from Dorit Aharonov, Amir Yacoby, and Hoi-Kwong Lo, and the invited speakers include Elham Kashefi, Google Quantum AI, IonQ, Intel, and RIKEN. A Japan-Netherlands matchmaking workshop on December 9 links the Dutch and Japanese ecosystems, and Kop will also visit a quantum computer in Japan with the delegation. Participation is free; registration closes on November 22.

Standards, Certification, and the LSI Test for the Post-Quantum Transition

Following two talks on quantum cryptanalysis, Kop speaks from 5:40 to 6:10 PM Japan time on responsible quantum innovation, standards, and the post-quantum transition. He brings Stanford RQT's foundational work, the Quantum-ELSPI framework, and the LSI test from his Nexus paper, which asks that security measures be least trade-restrictive, security-sufficient, and innovation-preserving. Nagoya joins his forthcoming engagements at CIGI, the University of Virginia, and ACM. Our article also profiles Japan's quantum computers at RIKEN, Fujitsu, Quantinuum, and IBM, and a panel on certifying quantum key distribution.

Meer lezen
Prof. Mauritz Kop Chairs CIGI Quantum Nexus Workshop and Roundtable on Quantum, Intellectual Property, and National Security

On Wednesday, October 21, 2026, Prof. Mauritz Kop chairs the CIGI Quantum Nexus workshop in Waterloo: a public online expert panel from 12:00 to 1:00 PM Eastern Time, followed by a closed-door roundtable. As Senior Fellow and Principal Investigator at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, Kop leads the project The Quantum Nexus: A Framework for Canadian Strategic Advantage in a Contested Domain, funded through the Department of National Defence's MINDS program.

Five Panelists, a Senior Roundtable, and Six Emerging Scholars

The panel brings together John Sarrao (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), Michael Karanicolas (Dalhousie University), Tina Dekker, Michael P. A. Murphy (Queen's University), and Timo Minssen (University of Copenhagen), with CIGI's Tracey Forrest. The roundtable, held under the CIGI Rule, includes the Privy Council Office's Dominic Rochon, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office's Konstantinos Georgaras, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce Kevin J. Wolf, Michele Mosca, Larry Diamond, and Los Alamos physicist Alan J. Hurd. Six emerging scholars from universities across Canada, personally selected and mentored by Kop, join the day and will write analytical notes for the project's final CIGI report.

The LSI Test and Kop's Work With Canada Since 2022

The workshop builds on Kop's Nexus paper, indexed in the Harvard-Smithsonian NASA Astrophysics Data System, and its LSI test for security measures that are least trade-restrictive, security-sufficient, and innovation-preserving. It continues his work on the Council of Canadian Academies expert panel chaired by the late Raymond Laflamme, his CIGI policy brief with Tracey Forrest, and his War on the Rocks essays. Our article also traces CIGI's history, from its founding by BlackBerry's Jim Balsillie, with a founding gift from Mike Lazaridis, to its role among G7 think tanks. The public panel will be recorded, and registration for the online session is open to everyone on the CIGI event page.

Meer lezen
Prof. Mauritz Kop Invited to Speak at the Inaugural ACM PQQS 2026 in Silicon Valley on the Race to Quantum First

Prof. Mauritz Kop has been invited to speak at ACM PQQS 2026, the inaugural ACM Conference on Post-Quantum and Quantum-based Security, held from November 2 to 4, 2026 in Silicon Valley near San Jose. Kop, Founder of the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology, is listed with his affiliations at CIGI and the U.S. Air Force Academy, and his talk is titled The Race to Quantum First: Building a Secure and Responsible Quantum Future.

A New ACM SIGSAC Venue With Boneh, Babbush, Preneel, and NIST

ACM's security community launched PQQS as a new annual venue for post-quantum cryptography, quantum cryptography, and the security of quantum computing systems. General Chair Elisa Bertino and program chairs Rei Safavi-Naini and Ashish Kundu assembled a program of twenty-six peer-reviewed papers, keynotes by Dan Boneh, Ryan Babbush of Google Quantum AI, Renato Renner, and Ramana Kompella, invited talks by Bart Preneel, Reza Nejabati, Vipul Goyal, Yevgeniy Dodis, and J.R. Rao, and a panel with NIST's Dustin Moody and Michele Mosca. One of the call's four topic areas covers post-quantum migration policy, regulation, and ecosystem readiness.

Procurement, the LSI Test, and a European Quantum Act

Kop's talk proposes a governance agenda in which responsible innovation becomes an instrument of strategic leadership for the United States and its allies. Public procurement can accelerate post-quantum adoption, and the LSI test from his Nexus paper, indexed in the Harvard-Smithsonian NASA Astrophysics Data System, selects security measures that are least trade-restrictive, security-sufficient, and innovation-preserving. A hospital example shows how operators can protect patient data, and a European Quantum Act architecture would strengthen the EU as a capable allied partner. The talk also weighs a lean, U.S.-led verification body inspired by IAEA safeguards. It builds on Stanford RQT's foundational papers, on his two War on the Rocks essays on the race to quantum first, and on his advisory work for the U.S. Government, including the Pentagon and the Department of State.

Meer lezen
Prof. Mauritz Kop Invited to Co-Opting AI: Quantum at the University of Virginia, With Paul Davies, Shohini Ghose, and Host Mona Sloane

Prof. Mauritz Kop, Founder of the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology, has been invited to speak at Co-Opting AI: Quantum, a public conversation hosted by the University of Virginia's Digital Technology for Democracy Lab, NYU's Institute for Public Knowledge, and Sloane Lab. The online event takes place on Wednesday, October 28, 2026, from 4:00 to 5:15 PM Eastern Time, with the physicists Paul Davies of Arizona State University and Shohini Ghose of Wilfrid Laurier University, and with Professor Mona Sloane as host.

Episode 55 of Mona Sloane's Co-Opting AI Series Turns to Quantum

Mona Sloane's Co-Opting AI series has gathered leading scholars on technology and society since April 2019, from Alondra Nelson and Virginia Eubanks on Justice to Sandra Wachter on the GDPR and Danielle Keats Citron on Privacy. The quantum episode is the series' fifty-fifth and its first on quantum technology. The organizers frame it around one idea: quantum computing is arriving into institutions, supply chains, and geopolitical formations shaped by AI, and that inheritance will shape how quantum develops as a technological and social phenomenon. For lawyers who work on AI governance, this is the moment the familiar questions of liability, access, and accountability move to the next technology.

Stanford RQT Scholarship and Kop's Talks From Oxford to Washington

Kop brings the body of work that defined responsible quantum technology: the Yale Journal of Law and Technology article on a legal-ethical framework for quantum technology, the Ten Principles for Responsible Quantum Innovation, the Nature Physics call for responsible quantum technology, the Science article on standards-first governance, and the Quantum-ELSPI research field. The invitation follows his talks at Oxford, TU Munich, CNAS, CIGI, and Stanford Law School, his two War on the Rocks essays, and his advisory work for the U.S. Government, including the Pentagon and the Department of State. The session is open to the public and will be recorded for those who register.

Meer lezen
Quantum Neurosymbolic AI: Verifiable Machine Reasoning Meets Quantum Computing

The defining weakness of today's generative AI is that it cannot show a checkable reason for its answers. Neurosymbolic AI, neural networks fused with symbolic logic, is one structural research answer to hallucination, and it is now converging with quantum computing from the other direction. This analysis maps that intersection: what is proven, what is prospective, and why the law should engage before the architecture hardens.

How the neural leg proposes and the symbolic leg verifies

The neurosymbolic thesis already has a working demonstration. A neural model that invents creative constructions, paired with a symbolic engine that verifies every deductive step, solved Olympiad geometry problems at medalist level with machine-checkable proofs. The same division of labor, generalized, is what regulated industries have asked of artificial intelligence all along: keep the learning, add the audit trail. Add world models, predictive internal representations that support counterfactual reasoning, and the architecture starts to resemble something lawyers know intimately: rules applied to established facts, tested against but-for scenarios.

Where quantum technology could enter, and how mature it is

Quantum computing could eventually serve either leg. On the neural side, quantum kernel methods carry rigorous but narrow speedup proofs. On the symbolic side, some proof-search and constraint problems may admit quantum search or optimization methods, with no practical advantage demonstrated so far. The maturity picture is clear: no quantum advantage has been demonstrated for any neurosymbolic workload, and the direction remains prospective research. Prospective is precisely when governance is cheap.

Why the EU AI Act rewards reasoning that can be inspected

The regulatory alignment is unusually clean. The documentation, transparency, and human-oversight obligations for high-risk systems are easier to meet when reasoning can be surfaced, contested, and appealed, a bar that explainability by construction clears structurally where post-hoc explanation techniques strain. For legal applications the stakes are concrete: verifiable machine reasoning supports examination, contestation, and appeal, a theme running through our work since Shaping the Law of AI: Transatlantic Perspectives.

The analysis below walks through the neurosymbolic wave, the world-model turn, the quantum primitives that could serve each leg, and a three-part agenda for policymakers who want verifiable AI reasoning rewarded in procurement, conformity assessment, and standards while the architecture is still open to influence.

Meer lezen
Northwestern University Debaters Took Up Mauritz Kop's Article on AI, Intellectual Property and the Public Domain (2020)

What happens when a law review article becomes debate material? At Northwestern University in 2020, debaters took up Mauritz Kop's argument that autonomously machine-made works belong in an articulated public domain, and found that the question of who owns AI output divides a room like few others.

The motion: no one should own works made without human creative input

Kop's 2020 article in the Texas Intellectual Property Law Journal stakes out a clear position: when artificial intelligence generates works without meaningful human creative input, no one should own them. The law should avoid stretching authorship to cover such output and should route it into a commons by design, Res Publicae ex Machina, public property from the machine.

The proposition invites adversarial testing. Affirm it, and you must explain to investors why their generative AI pipelines produce unownable output. Oppose it, and you must explain what authorship means when nobody authored anything, and why locking up machine output serves the human creators copyright was invented for.

How the 2020 thought experiment became today's docket

Courts and copyright offices in several jurisdictions have addressed whether works involving generative AI contain enough human authorship for protection, while training data disputes ask the mirror-image question of what machines may learn from. The article's companion doctrine traveled too: the follow-up analysis appeared in a transatlantic volume, as covered in Public Property from the Machine published in Harmonizing Intellectual Property Law for a Trans-Atlantic Knowledge Economy.

That trajectory, from journal article to book chapter to debate material and live litigation theme, is what scholarly impact looks like in practice: arguments that other people find worth having. When students choose to attack and defend a thesis in structured debate, the ideas have left the journal and started doing work in the world.

Why debaters chose this article

Good debate material needs a position clear enough to attack and deep enough to survive the attack. The articulated-public-domain thesis offers both, because it rests on first principles: incentive theory, cultural diversity, the economics of exclusive rights, and the public's stake in what machines make. The full announcement traces the argument, links the article itself, and explains why this AI and IP debate has only sharpened since it was written.

Meer lezen
Musical Interludes at the 2nd Annual Stanford Responsible Quantum Technology Conference

A quantum governance conference with a concert program sounds like an ornament until you sit through one. At the second annual Stanford gathering on responsible quantum technology, held on May 20, 2024, the musical interludes were scheduled with the same care as the keynotes, and they earned their place in the day.

What standing waves in a piano teach a policy audience about qubits

Many acoustic instruments produce standing waves: strings and air columns vibrate in superposed overtones, and their interference decides what the ear hears. That is a genuine classical analogue of the wave interference at the heart of quantum computation, which is why a live performance can hand a policy audience a physical intuition that no diagram delivers.

The program: from Chopin to Schubert and Schoenberg, performed by the conference community

The day's music ran from Chopin's Grande Polonaise Brillante to Schubert's Der Hirt auf dem Felsen and Schoenberg's Opus 11, a wide arc from tonal to atonal, performed by musicians from within the conference's own community. The Stanford Law School stage has form here. The same campus culture that staged operetta with the Stanford Light Opera Company, see Johann Strauss' Die Fledermaus, treats performance as part of intellectual life.

Why shared music builds the trust an interdisciplinary field runs on

Interdisciplinary fields fail socially before they fail intellectually. Physicists, lawyers, ethicists, and diplomats arrive with different vocabularies and different status games, and a shared aesthetic experience is one of the few fast ways to make one community out of four professions. Twenty minutes of Chopin does more for cross-disciplinary candor than any icebreaker, because it asks nothing of anyone except attention. The interludes rehearsed the very trust that responsible quantum governance, and responsible artificial intelligence before it, depend on.

The full post reconstructs the program of May 20, 2024, names the performers who carried it, and explains why the arts-science bridge works as a governance tool, with the conference summary archived at Stanford for readers who want the substance behind the songs.

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

One hundred years after quantum mechanics upended physics, the United Nations proclaimed 2025 the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology and asked what the next hundred should look like. A new chapter co-authored by Mauritz Kop for a volume in the Year's scholarly program answers for one region, mapping the quantum ELSPI, the ethical, legal, social, and policy implications, of quantum technologies across the United States and Canada.

Where North American quantum governance is actually decided

The chapter's premise is practical. North America's quantum economy runs through cloud platforms and proprietary toolchains, which means the consequential governance decisions are being made in standards bodies, procurement offices, and competition policy, long before any parliament passes a dedicated quantum law. Providers of quantum hardware, benchmarks, and developer tooling shape access conditions and technical practice alongside formal regulators and standards bodies.

That reframing matters for the security agenda too. The migration to post-quantum cryptography is the region's major near-term quantum security program, driven by the prospect that future quantum computers could break today's public-key encryption, and by adversaries harvesting encrypted data now in order to decrypt it later.

How the ELSA lens widened into ELSPI

Behind the chapter stands a research field with a Stanford pedigree. Quantum ELSPI widens the classic ethical-legal-social lens to include policy, market structure, intellectual property, and national security, treating ethics as an operating model to be executed, audited, and improved. The chapter applies the same operational turn that artificial intelligence governance took when principles were translated into controls, documentation, and assurance.

The author team mirrors that ambition: quantum physicist Shohini Ghose, security scholar Lindsay Rand, legal scholar Mauritz Kop, Bruna Shinohara de Mendonça, and Karl Thibault, a multidisciplinary blend Kop has brought into international institutions before, including his work consulting UNESCO and the OECD on quantum ethics and technology policy.

What the chapter forecasts for the next five to ten years

The chapter closes with a five-to-ten-year outlook on how North American quantum technology governance is likely to evolve, from supply-chain chokepoints and export controls to sector-by-sector assurance regimes, grounded in how the ecosystem is actually structured.

For readers in government, industry, or research management, it doubles as a checklist: if your organization touches quantum systems, your cryptographic inventory, procurement clauses, and standards participation are where responsible quantum begins. The full announcement explains what the chapter argues, who wrote it, and why the UNESCO-led Year gives it unusual reach.

Meer lezen
Quantum Superposition, Entanglement, and Tunneling Explained for Law and Policy

Every debate about quantum law eventually runs into three words of physics: superposition, entanglement, and tunneling. Together they explain why quantum computing will break today's public-key encryption, why properly implemented quantum communication can reveal interception through its error statistics, and why quantum sensors raise privacy questions long before large quantum computers exist. This explainer unpacks all three for a legal and policy audience, accurately and without the folklore.

Which recent experiments turned quantum theory into engineering fact

The physics is a century old, and the decisive experiments are recent. A 16-microgram sapphire crystal has been placed in a superposition of two vibration states at once, the heaviest "Schrödinger cat" prepared to date. Loophole-free Bell tests in 2015 observed correlations between entangled particles that no local hidden-variable model can reproduce, work crowned by the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics. And in 2020, physicists first clocked how long ultracold atoms spend inside a barrier while tunneling through it: about 0.6 milliseconds, for a passage classical physics forbids outright. Quantum mechanics is now an engineering substrate, and the engineering keeps pushing the quantum-classical boundary outward year by year.

What each phenomenon means for encryption, networks, and sensing law

Each phenomenon carries its own governance consequence. Superposition, interference, and phase estimation together make Shor's algorithm work, and with it the harvest-now-decrypt-later threat: encrypted data copied today can be unlocked by a future quantum machine, which is why cryptographic migration deadlines exist now. Entanglement is the resource behind quantum networks and entanglement-based key distribution, and a future quantum internet whose infrastructure crosses borders will raise jurisdiction and interception questions. Tunneling sits inside the hardware itself, from flash memory to the Josephson junctions of superconducting processors, and inside a generation of quantum sensors with real dual-use potential. The stakes of getting this wrong were spelled out bluntly in Foreign Policy's warning about quantum computing.

Why lawmakers still have lead time on quantum technology

The essay's core claim is simple: these phenomena are the policy argument. Where AI governance had to be retrofitted onto deployed systems, quantum technology still offers lawmakers lead time. The full analysis walks through each phenomenon with the recent experimental evidence in hand, then lands the legal consequence: superposition sets the cryptographic migration clock, entanglement sets the network and jurisdiction agenda, and tunneling sets the hardware and sensing agenda. Read on to see how policymakers can use that lead time on cryptographic migration, network governance, hardware controls, and sensing risks.

Meer lezen
Quantum Law Goes Mainstream: Our Stanford RQT Scholarship in Forbes, MIT Sloan, Yahoo Finance, Foreign Policy, The Quantum Insider, and Fortune

At the frontier of quantum & AI — from breakthrough to strategy. For the boards, general counsel, and founders deciding the quantum decade: a guide to the responsible-quantum-technology research behind the headlines — from the foundational Berkeley paper on quantum IP to a Nature Physics framework, a Harvard medical-ethics doctrine, and a Los Alamos supply-chain dashboard — and where the world's leading outlets picked it up.

The Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology

Research from the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology (2023–2025), founded and directed by Mauritz Kop — also founder of AIRecht and Quentir — has been featured, cited, or authored across Foreign Policy, Fortune, Yahoo Finance, MIT Sloan Management Review, the Forbes Technology Council, and, three separate times, The Quantum Insider. Published at the summit of the scientific literature — Science and Nature Physics — and built on the quantum-IP trilogy that runs from the Berkeley Technology Law Journal through the Max Planck patent-landscape study to Oxford's market-power analysis.

Quantum Governance, IP, and Strategy

Quantum is now a governance, IP, and strategy problem as much as a physics problem — and it is arriving now, in algorithms, devices, and materials. This piece maps the coverage, the scholarship behind it, and what it means for your organisation: from the 10 Principles for Responsible Quantum Innovation and the SEA framework to quantum patent strategy, post-quantum cryptography migration, and dual-use compliance.

The fastest way to see where you stand is not a meeting — it is your own paperwork: run your AI and ICT contracts through the 24/7 self-service AIRecht Contract Scanner and get a structured report in minutes.

Meer lezen