Artificiële Intelligentie & Recht
Innovation, Quantum-AI Technology & Law
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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 Quantum Computing
Quantum Computational Antitrust: How Quantum Computing Could Reshape Competition Enforcement
Quantum Computational Antitrust: How Quantum Computing Could Reshape Competition Enforcement

Antitrust enforcement is becoming a contest between models. Agencies screen procurement databases with algorithms, firms price with reinforcement learning, and scholars at Stanford's CodeX center have organized the discipline of computational antitrust around a simple premise: enforcement must compute as well as the markets it polices. This analysis asks what happens when the computation itself turns quantum.

Why enforcers and firms already compete with algorithms

Brazil's CADE mines bidding data for cartel fingerprints, Korea scores tenders for collusion risk, and the OECD catalogues the tooling. Experiments meanwhile show that independent AI pricing agents can learn supra-competitive strategies without ever communicating, a form of algorithmic collusion that slips past cartel law's agreement requirement. The enforcement arms race is already running on classical hardware, and the stakes were spelled out early in the Oxford JIPLP work on quantum computing, intellectual property and market power.

What quantum computing could add to merger review and cartel screening

Quantum computers will not "try everything at once." Future fault-tolerant machines may improve particular simulation, optimization, and sampling tasks that merger review poses, although no general enforcement advantage has been demonstrated. None of this is deployed at any agency today, and the essay says so plainly. The nearer-term disruption runs through evidence. Harvest-now-decrypt-later means lawfully seized encrypted cartel archives may become readable mid-investigation once quantum machines can run Shor's algorithm, a rare case of the quantum threat working for enforcers, within hard due-process limits.

Why access to quantum computing becomes a competition question

The deepest question is asymmetry. If quantum forecasting and optimization arrive first at firms that already dominate cloud platforms and patent portfolios, informational advantage compounds into entrenched market power through purely unilateral conduct, with no cartel required. Quantum technology therefore poses competition authorities an access question before it poses an evidence question, and the answers will be set by whoever engages first: standards bodies, cloud gatekeepers, or regulators.

The full analysis sets out a five-part readiness agenda for enforcement agencies this decade, from cryptographic inventories of their own case files and leniency archives to sandboxed pilots of quantum screening tools with pre-registered validation protocols. Read it to see how competition agencies can prepare validation protocols, access safeguards, and scoped pilots before quantum-assisted evidence reaches proceedings.

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Quantum Computing, Governance, Intellectual PropertyMauritz Kopcomputational antitrust, quantum legal informatics, competition law, market power, quantum computing
Responsible Quantum-Enabled Financial Forecasting: What Banks and Supervisors Must Govern Before Quantum Advantage
Responsible Quantum-Enabled Financial Forecasting: What Banks and Supervisors Must Govern Before Quantum Advantage

Banks were talking about quantum computing while the hardware was still a physics demonstration. In 2025, financial institutions reported further hardware experiments, including a hybrid bond-trading study on production-scale data, and these remain research results rather than live production deployments. This analysis separates the verified results from the marketing and asks what responsible quantum finance demands before the technology touches live forecasting.

Which banks ran quantum experiments in 2025, and what they found

The evidence base is suddenly concrete. A JPMorganChase-led research collaboration demonstrated certified randomness on Quantinuum hardware in a Nature paper, a cryptographic and simulation primitive rather than a forecasting result. HSBC and IBM reported up to 34 percent better fill-probability predictions, on their chosen metric and against their own classical baselines, on production-scale bond-trading data. Goldman Sachs researchers priced out what genuine advantage in derivatives would cost in logical qubits. Each result comes with caveats, and the caveats are exactly where governance begins.

How supervisors will apply model risk management to quantum models

Financial regulators already police predictive models, from classical statistics to artificial intelligence, through model risk management regimes like the Federal Reserve's SR 11-7. Quantum forecasting strains that machinery: outputs are probabilistic, hardware noise drifts daily, and in at least one bank experiment the noise itself seemed to help. The essay sets out what quantum-grade validation, documentation, and independent challenge should look like.

Why compute asymmetry and post-quantum migration belong on the same agenda

Two system-level risks frame the institutional ones. If early capability concentrates in a few firms, markets inherit a new compute asymmetry, a market-integrity question with echoes of the concentration concerns we mapped in Intellectual Property in Quantum Computing and Market Power.

The same progress that speeds up forecasting breaks the encryption financial infrastructure depends on. The G7 Cyber Expert Group has warned that adversaries may be harvesting encrypted financial data today to decrypt later, and now urges a coordinated post-quantum migration across the sector. Decades-long confidentiality horizons and expiring cryptography are two sides of one balance sheet.

The conclusion is practical: the governance hooks for quantum technology in finance already exist in model risk management, operational resilience, AI oversight, and cryptographic standards. What is missing is an explicit statement, from supervisors and boards alike, of how quantum capability plugs into each hook. Read the full analysis for the verified experiments, the validation blueprint, and the governance framework.

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Quantum Computing, Governance, InnovationMauritz Kopquantum finance, financial forecasting, responsible quantum technology, model risk, post-quantum cryptography
Quantum Computing Companies by Industry and Qubit Modality: A 2026 Field Guide
Quantum Computing Companies by Industry and Qubit Modality: A 2026 Field Guide

The quantum industry of 2026 no longer fits on a conference slide. Hardware firms ship processors on published roadmaps, software specialists have become acquisition targets, and banks, pharmaceutical companies, and automakers run standing quantum programs. This field guide maps the quantum computing companies active in each industry and explains why reading that map correctly is now a legal skill as well as a technical one. The guide names only milestones, revenue figures, and partnerships that are publicly documented, and it treats corporate roadmaps as targets rather than achievements.

Hardware in 2026: six qubit modalities and the companies building each

The platform layer divides by qubit modality. IBM, Google Quantum AI, Rigetti, IQM, and Alice & Bob build superconducting machines; IonQ and Quantinuum lead trapped ions; PsiQuantum bets on photonics made in semiconductor fabs; Pasqal and QuEra champion neutral atoms; D-Wave sells annealing. Modality shapes supply chains and patent positions, while export classification turns on an item's technical parameters, destination, and end user. After Microsoft's contested topological-qubit announcement of 2025, it also decides how much scientific skepticism a roadmap deserves.

Who is buying: pharma, finance, automotive, and government programs

The buy side has professionalized. Boehringer Ingelheim partnered with Google on quantum drug discovery in 2021; JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, and Goldman Sachs run sustained quantum finance programs spanning optimization experiments and post-quantum migration; BMW works with Quantinuum on materials chemistry for future mobility. Governments buy differently, through benchmarking programs and national missions that double as industrial policy. Artificial intelligence taught these organizations what an emerging-technology program looks like, and quantum computing is inheriting both the playbook and its blind spots.

Why lawyers should read vendor roadmaps before signing

Every quantum contract now sits inside three legal structures at once: cloud procurement terms that decide who owns results, export controls that classify quantum hardware as dual-use technology across allied jurisdictions, and national-security screening that reaches quantum M&A and cross-border investment. The strategic backdrop, why states treat this sector as critical infrastructure in waiting, is set out in our analysis of the nexus of quantum technology, intellectual property, and national security.

The full guide names the players per layer and per industry, separates verified 2025 and 2026 milestones from marketing, and closes with the due-diligence questions boards, buyers, and policymakers should ask before they sign.

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Quantum Computing, Innovation, GeopoliticsMauritz Kopquantum computing companies, quantum industry, quantum ecosystem, quantum supply chain, quantum cloud
Quantum-AI: Nondeterministic Computing and the Exponential-Speedup Claim, Audited
Quantum-AI: Nondeterministic Computing and the Exponential-Speedup Claim, Audited

Every technology cycle has its incantation, and quantum computing's is "exponentially faster." The phrase is true just often enough to be dangerous. Quantum algorithms hold a superpolynomial advantage over the best known classical methods for factoring, may deliver substantial advantages on specific quantum-simulation problems, and have provable speedups on a handful of engineered learning problems; none of that establishes a general exponential speedup, and for most workloads the advantage is unproven. This analysis audits the exponential speedup claim against the mathematical results and asks what remains for boards, courts, and regulators once the slogan is stripped away.

Where the proven speedups are, and where they are missing

The scoreboard is more precise than the headlines. Shor's algorithm genuinely threatens public-key cryptography. Grover's algorithm delivers a quadratic gain. Quantum computers are not known to solve NP-complete problems efficiently: the machine does not "try all answers at once," it choreographs interference. We walk through the fine print that separates proven quantum advantage from investor prose, including the caveats attached to famous algorithms for linear algebra and machine learning.

How a bank-backed research collaboration demonstrated certified quantum randomness in 2025

A quantum state evolves deterministically between measurements, but the measurement that ends a computation is probabilistic: the same circuit, run twice, may return different answers, and correctness is a property of distributions. This nondeterministic behavior is physical randomness, distinct from the nondeterministic machines of complexity theory. That is comfortable for machine learning and uncomfortable for verification, audit, and liability. The strangeness is already monetizable. In 2025 a commercial trapped-ion processor produced certifiably random bits, converting physical indeterminacy into a compliance-grade evidentiary object. Meanwhile the reverse direction matured quietly: artificial intelligence now designs error-correction decoders and calibrates quantum hardware, closing a loop in which each field accelerates the other.

What the EU AI Act needs before quantum-AI systems reach the market

The governance stakes do not wait for quantum advantage. The EU AI Act imposes accuracy, robustness, and testing duties without requiring deterministic outputs, and hybrid quantum-classical pipelines will need validation suited to probabilistic behavior. They demand conformity assessment that samples and bounds distributions, plus technical documentation covering two failure surfaces at once, statistical learning and hardware noise. Transparency-first instruments are already the trend in AI regulation, as we analyzed for California's frontier-model disclosure regime in the Daiki SB-53 recipe for frontier AI transparency. Quantum-AI extends that logic to the physics itself.

The full analysis separates the three real speedup regimes, explains barren plateaus and dequantization in plain language, and closes with a concrete agenda for governing quantum technology before the inflection point: distributional testing, dual technical files, and certified entropy standards.

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Quantum-AI, Artificial Intelligence, Quantum ComputingMauritz Kopquantum-AI, Shor algorithm, quantum machine learning, nondeterministic computing, quantum governance
The Quantum Internet: Teleportation, Entanglement, QKD, PQC and Hybrid Security Strategies
The Quantum Internet: Teleportation, Entanglement, QKD, PQC and Hybrid Security Strategies

The quantum internet will do something classical networks cannot do at all: distribute entanglement between cities, teleport quantum states, and detect interception at the protocol level. This explainer walks the whole stack for a legal and policy audience: teleportation, quantum key distribution over fiber and satellite, the NIST post-quantum standards, and the hybrid strategies that boards and ministries must adopt long before the network itself matures. The physics is subtle. The policy consequences are concrete and come with deadlines.

What Delft, The Hague and the Micius satellite have already demonstrated

The milestones are no longer thought experiments. In 2024, researchers entangled quantum processors in Delft and The Hague over 25 kilometers of ordinary underground telecom fiber, a genuine metropolitan quantum network link. China's Micius satellite has distributed quantum keys between ground stations 7,600 kilometers apart, securing a videoconference between Beijing and Vienna. The strategic significance of who builds and controls these networks is examined in the CNAS Entanglement Edge quantum networking report. Teleportation itself is routinely misread: it transfers a quantum state using entanglement plus a classical signal. No matter moves, nothing exceeds light speed, and the original state is destroyed.

Why the post-quantum deadlines exist years before the hardware

The urgency is cryptographic. A future quantum computer running Shor's algorithm breaks RSA and elliptic-curve encryption, and adversaries are already recording traffic to decrypt later, the harvest-now-decrypt-later attack. NIST answered in August 2024 with its first finalized post-quantum standards (ML-KEM, ML-DSA, SLH-DSA) and selected the code-based HQC in March 2025 as a future backup. Migration timelines from U.S. and European authorities cluster around 2030 to 2035. For long-lived data, interception already creates the confidentiality risk, because retained ciphertext may become readable later.

How layered security replaces the search for a single quantum fix

The central argument is architectural. Security in the quantum transition comes from hybrid strategies: classical plus post-quantum key establishment, AES-256 payload encryption, QKD only on high-value links where its trusted-node risks are consciously accepted, and crypto-agility as the governing design principle. The analysis closes with a concrete sequence for enterprises and governments: build the cryptographic inventory, triage data by confidentiality lifetime, write post-quantum requirements into procurement and audits, and run quantum-network pilots with candid trusted-node risk assessments. Read on to see how physics, standards, and statecraft interlock, and why the migration calendar is an obligation of today.

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Quantum Technology, Quantum Computing, GovernanceMauritz Kopquantum internet, QKD, post-quantum cryptography, AES-256, quantum teleportation, hybrid security
Quantum Computing Use Cases in 2026: Simulation, Optimization, Machine Learning, and Cryptanalysis Ranked by Maturity
Quantum Computing Use Cases in 2026: Simulation, Optimization, Machine Learning, and Cryptanalysis Ranked by Maturity

Every technology wave reaches the moment when the buyer's question changes from "what is it?" to "what is it for?" Quantum computing reached that moment between Google's below-threshold error-correction result of December 2024 and the first error-corrected chemistry calculation of 2025. The answer has four parts, simulation, optimization, machine learning, and cryptanalysis, and they are far from equally ripe. This analysis maps all four families and separates demonstrated results from projections, because that separation is where sound strategy and sound regulation both begin.

Four use-case families at four levels of maturity

Simulating molecules and materials is the application nature itself argues for: chemistry is quantum-mechanical, so quantum simulation attacks the problem in its native language. Drug discovery, battery chemistry, and catalysts carry the largest societal upside and a strong theoretical case for quantum advantage on selected problems, with practical advantage still to be demonstrated. Optimization is the family where marketing runs furthest ahead of evidence; 2025 benchmarks show classical solvers still winning on portfolio and logistics problems. Quantum machine learning sits at the frontier where artificial intelligence meets quantum hardware, promising and unproven in equal measure.

Why cryptanalysis is a use case with a compliance deadline

Cryptanalysis is different in kind. Shor's algorithm makes today's public-key encryption mortal, and the harvest-now-decrypt-later strategy means long-lived secrets are already at risk, because adversaries can record ciphertext today and decrypt it when the hardware arrives. With NIST's post-quantum cryptography standards finalized in August 2024, migration has become a concrete security and governance obligation, and in a growing number of sectors and jurisdictions a binding legal one. This is the one quantum use case with a date attached, and it is the reason cryptographic inventories are climbing onto board agendas across regulated sectors.

How each family lands in a different regulatory lane

Simulation walks into healthcare regulation, optimization into financial supervision, quantum machine learning into AI governance, and cryptanalysis into export controls. Getting the maturity story right therefore determines which rules bind, when, and whom. The framework for that kind of disciplined, values-based assessment is set out in the Stanford RQT framework and its ten principles, which anchor this analysis.

The full article walks through the demonstrated results per family, from logical qubits and benchmark studies to barren plateaus and FIPS standards, and closes with a governance map that policymakers, general counsel, and quantum technology strategists can put to work today.

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Quantum Computing, Innovation, HealthcareMauritz Kopquantum computing use cases, quantum simulation, optimization, quantum machine learning, cryptanalysis
Geopolitical Risk to Critical Raw Materials in Quantum Computing: Stanford GTG White Paper by Lee, Grotto and Kop
Geopolitical Risk to Critical Raw Materials in Quantum Computing: Stanford GTG White Paper by Lee, Grotto and Kop

The quantum race is usually told in qubit counts and error rates. A 2025 Stanford GTG white paper by Min-Ha Lee, Andrew J. Grotto, and Mauritz Kop tells it as a story about minerals: the critical raw materials that every major quantum-computing hardware modality requires, and the short list of countries that control them.

Which materials every qubit technology needs

Strontium and ytterbium for neutral atoms, niobium for superconducting circuits, indium for bump-bonds, tantalum for oscillators, and helium-3 for the dilution refrigerators that cool it all to millikelvin temperatures. Every qubit modality carries its own mineral bill, and many inputs have supplier geographies measured in a handful of countries. About 90 percent of niobium is mined in Brazil alone, and China dominates both the mining and the processing of the rare-earth elements that quantum lasers, magnets, and optics consume. Add isotopically enriched silicon-28 and specialty photonics, and the bill of materials reads like a stress test of globalization.

How the authors score the choke points

The paper's contribution is a sector-specific risk methodology: score each material on supply-chain vulnerability, exploitability, and strategic impact, instead of relying on cross-sectoral national lists that blur what quantum computing needs. The exercise confirms the rare earths as critical and elevates a sleeper, high-purity molybdenum, which the report identifies as an under-examined enabler in the device and substrate supply chain. It is the same strategic terrain mapped in An LSI Test for Securing the Quantum Industrial Commons, now extended to the mineral layer.

Why China's 2024 and 2025 export controls make this urgent

The risk is already active. Building on its 2023 gallium and germanium controls and its 2024 antimony controls, Beijing tightened export controls in December 2024 and extended them in 2025 to bismuth, indium, molybdenum, tellurium, tungsten, and heavy rare earths, and prices for several of them spiked. The authors' warning cuts both ways: concentrated supply invites coercion, and unilateral controls invite self-sufficiency drives that fracture the very supply chains they aim to protect. Multilateral coordination, stockpiling, recycling, and diversified sourcing work best before an industry scales, and quantum is still, briefly, at that stage.

The full post walks through the methodology, the materials inventory, the 2024 and 2025 control wave, the follow-on Quantum Criticality Index research agenda, and why supply-chain concentration is becoming a standard due-diligence question for technology counsel.

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Geopolitics, Quantum Computing, GovernanceMauritz Kopcritical raw materials, quantum supply chain, helium-3, export controls, geopolitics
Quantum Superposition, Entanglement, and Tunneling Explained for Law and Policy
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.

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Quantum Technology, Quantum Computing, AcademicsMauritz Kopquantum mechanics, superposition, entanglement, tunneling, quantum law, quantum governance
Mauritz Kop Interviewed for IDC PeerScape Report on Quantum Computing Governance Practices
Mauritz Kop Interviewed for IDC PeerScape Report on Quantum Computing Governance Practices

International Data Corporation (IDC), the global IT market-intelligence firm, has published IDC PeerScape: Practices for Quantum Computing Governance (May 2026, Doc # US54518926), by David Weldon and Heather West, PhD. The report distills how forward-thinking organizations are building governance for quantum computing on top of their existing data and risk-management practices—and Mauritz Kop, Founder of the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology, was interviewed and contributed expert responses for attribution.

A buyer-side discipline, not a research curiosity

The PeerScape genre is peer-learning guidance: IDC collects what organizations already moving on a problem are doing and packages it for the technology buyer—the CIO, CISO, and risk owner. By treating quantum governance this way, an established IT-research house signals that quantum readiness has become a present-tense program for enterprises, not a topic reserved for policy seminars. The organizations profiled include the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology, an academic center, alongside industry organizations.

The two-pronged risk

IDC frames the urgency around the cryptographic clock. Sensitive data needs protection now against "harvest now, decrypt later" attacks, in which encrypted traffic captured today is unsealed once a sufficiently capable quantum computer exists; and migrating critical infrastructure to post-quantum cryptographic standards is complex enough that it must begin now. The arithmetic is unforgiving: any data whose confidentiality must outlast the arrival of cryptographically relevant quantum machines is at risk, which is why migration is a near-term governance obligation rather than a deferred IT task.

Governance engineered as an operating system

Kop's contribution carries the through-line of his work at Stanford RQT: turning quantum governance from principles into implementable operating models. He describes strategies that are operational (decision rights, controls, assurance, lifecycle gates), strategic (dual-use posture and geopolitics), and domain-aware (post-quantum cryptography, intellectual property, and sectoral use cases in medicine, finance, and space). Principles alone, he argues, do not scale—governance must be engineered with explicit RACI, stage-gates, documentation, and assurance, and a standards-based quantum-technology quality management system gives organizations an auditable, repeatable baseline.

Part of a widening practitioner record

The IDC interview joins a pattern of bringing responsible-quantum research to the people who must implement it, complementing Kop's policy work such as the global quantum policy brief published by CIGI. The same operating-system thesis recurs across audiences—from risk professionals to IT buyers to states—because it is designed to scale across functions. The deeper lesson is that quantum governance is best treated as an asset to build now: organizations that map their use cases, stage-gate their controls, adopt standards-first assurance, and plan for regulatory interoperability convert a long-horizon threat into resilience and license to operate. Readers can find more on the underlying scholarship through Kop's profile and selected works.

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Quantum Computing, Governance, StandardizationMauritz KopMauritz Kop, Quantum Governance, Stanford RQT, Governance, Standards, Policy, IDC, PeerScape, Post-Quantum Cryptography, QT-QMS, Quantum Computing, Risk Management
Stanford and Los Alamos Researchers Publish Critical Quantum Minerals Dashboard
Stanford and Los Alamos Researchers Publish Critical Quantum Minerals Dashboard

Quantum computers are usually discussed in the vocabulary of physics—qubits, coherence, error correction. A new Stanford–Los Alamos preprint argues that the decisive vocabulary of the next decade may instead be geological: niobium, nickel, indium, tantalum, helium-3. Min-Ha Lee, Alan J. Hurd, Jolante Wieke van Wijk, and Mauritz Kop map the critical minerals and materials that every serious quantum platform silently depends on, and show how concentrated mining, refining, and qualification chokepoints can convert commercial dependence into strategic vulnerability.

Why a dashboard, and why now

The Stanford–Los Alamos team's central proposal is a Quantum Criticality and Critical Minerals (QCCM) dashboard: a continuously updated, allied decision-support instrument—grounded in the preprint's two-level criticality screening—that tracks concentration, substitutability, qualification bottlenecks, stockpiling gaps, and geopolitical stress signals across quantum computing, sensing, and networking. The argument is institutional rather than technical—static national critical-minerals lists, however valuable, refresh on bureaucratic timelines, while administrative export-control actions move markets in weeks. When China added bismuth to its dual-use control list in February 2025, the spot price rose roughly tenfold within two months. An instrument that registers such signals continuously is the difference between awareness and resilience.

Two use cases, one lesson

The authors develop the argument through two concrete cases. The first is niobium, the backbone of superconducting qubits: roughly ninety percent of world production comes from Brazil, the United States imports all of it, and Chinese state-linked groups have spent a decade quietly acquiring the assets. The second is the space-qualified single-photon detector, where radiation and thermal stress can degrade a quantum communications link into insecurity long before the hardware visibly fails. The lesson is the same in both: criticality lives at every layer of the stack—ore, refining, isotopes, components, qualification—and a strategy that only counts qubits will miss it. The same blind spot extends to national stockpiles, which exclude by statute the gases and isotopes—helium-3 above all—on which dilution refrigeration and quantum sensing actually run.

Materials policy as quantum statecraft

What elevates this preprint beyond supply-chain analysis is its placement of materials within the architecture of quantum statecraft: supply assurance and post-quantum cryptography migration as twin pillars of security, standards-aligned governance as the multiplier, and allied coordination as the operating system. It is a natural companion to the geostrategic analysis in the Oxford lecture on quantum threats, extending that argument from algorithms and adversaries down to the periodic table. For governments drafting quantum strategies, for industry qualifying components, and for scholars of economic security, the message is direct: the quantum age will be built from materials the democratic world does not currently control—and managing that fact deserves an instrument of its own.

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Quantum Technology, Quantum Computing, GovernanceHenry QuentirStanford RQT, National Security, Geopolitics, Export Controls, supply chains, CIGI, Quantum Governance, Mauritz Kop, Cybersecurity, Critical Minerals, Niobium, QCCM Dashboard, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Quantum Computing and Competition Law: Gasser, Aboy et al. Submit Comments to Italian Competition Authority AGCM
Quantum Computing and Competition Law: Gasser, Aboy et al. Submit Comments to Italian Competition Authority AGCM

Seven scholars—Urs Gasser, Mateo Aboy, I. Glenn Cohen, Mauritz Kop, Fabienne Marco, Timo Minssen, and John Palfrey—have submitted comments to the Italian Competition Authority's public consultation on quantum computing — an early move by a major competition regulator into a market still being formed.

Five dimensions, one variable

The AGCM asked about market structure, competitive dynamics, intellectual property, consolidation, and strategic dependencies. The submission's answer: all five run through interoperability—who sets the interfaces, who governs the benchmarks, and whether early cloud-access arrangements harden into path dependence before conventional indicators of dominance ever appear. Quantum architectures are incommensurable, not merely incompatible, which makes the usual platform-market playbook an imperfect guide and benchmark governance a first-order competition issue.

Measured on the evidence

The scholars are deliberately unalarmist: the submission reports that current patent data shows no anticommons, with concentration below mature classical-computing markets. The genuine risk is narrower—rights over interface-critical elements becoming unavoidable as standards crystallize, and three compounding forms of lock-in (technical, administrative, organizational) closing a market that still looks open on paper. The team's years of groundwork, from Ten Principles for Responsible Quantum Innovation to the patent-landscape studies, supplies the empirical base.

Process before prescription

The recommendations are staged: monitoring and transparency first, disclosure-oriented safeguards where dependencies form, intervention only on demonstrated exclusion—plus competition safeguards built directly into quantum standard-setting, from ISO/IEC JTC 3 to the emerging EU Quantum Act. In a market still being formed, the scholars argue, the right question is not what the market should look like, but whether the processes shaping it remain open, revisable, and not prematurely foreclosed.

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Quantum Computing, Competition Law, GovernanceHenry QuentirMauritz Kop, Urs Gasser, I. Glenn Cohen, Quantum Governance, Intellectual Property, Standards, AGCM, Competition Law, Antitrust, Interoperability, EU Quantum Act, Mateo Aboy, Timo Minssen, John Palfrey
EPJ Quantum Technology Publishes Quantum Criticality Index Study by Cho, Kop and Lee
EPJ Quantum Technology Publishes Quantum Criticality Index Study by Cho, Kop and Lee

EPJ Quantum Technology has published a peer-reviewed framework by Dongyoun Cho, Mauritz Kop, and Min-Ha Lee that gives policymakers something the quantum field has lacked: a Quantum Criticality Index designed to flag supply-chain chokepoints before they harden into strategic crises.

A tri-axial index for fragile supply chains

Quantum hardware depends on inputs most governments have never inventoried—helium-3, isotopically enriched silicon-28, thin-film lithium niobate, superconducting niobium, dilution refrigerators from a handful of specialist suppliers. The QCI scores each input on supply risk, substitutability, and strategic significance, then adds an artificial neural network foresight layer that detects trend shifts and stress-tests scenarios: demand surges, export restrictions, regional shocks. Static critical-minerals lists update too slowly for a technology that scales architecture by architecture; the QCI is built to move at the field's own pace.

The molybdenum case

Preliminary QCI results flagged molybdenum's concentration risk publicly in May 2024; in February 2025, China placed the metal under export licensing, with global price effects the paper documents. The index had flagged the chokepoint before the shock—one episode that neatly illustrates the argument for criticality-based foresight. The same anticipatory logic drives the geostrategic work Kop contributes to the Eric Schmidt-backed von Neumann Commission on quantum-AI geostrategy.

Hardware shield, software shield

The framework's strategic claim is that supply-chain assurance and post-quantum cryptography migration are twin pillars of quantum security: PQC protects the data, the QCI protects the physical capability to build the machines. Diagnosis feeds decision feeds delivery—allied procurement, targeted licensing, calibrated stockpiling, verifiable assurance. Quantum statecraft, the paper argues, begins with knowing your own dependencies better than your rivals know them.

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Quantum Technology, Quantum Computing, GeopoliticsHenry QuentirMauritz Kop, Quantum Governance, Geopolitics, National Security, supply chains, Critical Minerals, Export Controls, Quantum Criticality Index, Molybdenum, EPJ Quantum Technology, CISAC