Within the same fortnight in June 2022, two technology outlets sought out Mauritz Kop on the two governance questions that run through his scholarship: the ethics of quantum computing, and Europe's proposed AI Act. Emerging Tech Brew, Morning Brew's technology vertical, featured him in "As quantum computing advances, who's thinking about ethics?"; Dark Reading featured him in "EU Debates AI Act to Protect Human Rights, Define High-Risk Uses." In both, Kop is identified as a Transatlantic Technology Law Forum fellow at Stanford University and a strategic intellectual property lawyer at AIRecht.
Quantum ethics: act before the technology locks in
To Emerging Tech Brew, Kop's central message was about timing. "We were obviously too late for AI, and now, [for quantum computing], we still have the chance to be in time before the technology gets locked in," he said—invoking the Collingridge dilemma, in which a technology is easiest to steer precisely when its risks are hardest to see. The urgency is rooted in physics: superposition and entanglement give quantum machines a categorically different kind of power, including the eventual ability to break the public-key cryptography that protects today's communications—one reason the World Economic Forum's quantum governance principles name "non-maleficence" as a core value. Kop paired a call for transparency about present capability with a warning about a "Pandora's Box of unknown risks," and likened the field's duty of care to the Hippocratic Oath—"in this case, our society is the patient."
The EU AI Act: a product-safety regime for AI
To Dark Reading, Kop framed the EU AI Act as a product-safety regime that closes the gaps left by an otherwise unregulated field. "The risks are too high for nonbinding self-regulation by companies alone," he said, describing the act as "a human centric legal-ethical framework that intends to safeguard and protect human rights and fundamental freedoms from violations of these rights and freedoms by algorithms and smart machines." High-risk classification, he explained, scales obligations to danger—stricter rules for AI in healthcare and defense than for AI in tourism—through a dynamic, evolving list.
One conviction, two technologies
Both interviews express a single idea: that governance works best when embedded early, by design, and grounded in human rights rather than retrofitted after harm. Kop did not minimize the compliance burden on startups, nor the legal uncertainty that surrounds early regulation; his answer is "Trustworthy AI by Design," built in from the first line of code, and regulatory sandboxes that give responsible innovation room to breathe. More on the author's work is available via his scholar profile.
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