Mauritz Kop—Founder of the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology and a CIGI Senior Fellow—has posted as a preprint a book-length Article that reframes quantum strategy as a problem of disciplined openness. The Nexus of Quantum Technology, Intellectual Property, and National Security argues that democracies should pursue neither closure nor laissez-faire, but "security-sufficient openness," screened through a single administrable test. It is a strategic companion to the cryptographic argument set out in "A Bletchley Park for the Quantum Age."
Deterrence by denial for democratic resilience
The Article's organizing idea is responsible quantum technology reframed as values-based deterrence by denial: a legal, ethical, and institutional control plane that protects the shared "quantum industrial commons"—talent, tooling, standards, supply chains, and the research base—against authoritarian appropriation. Deterrence by denial aims to make hostile gains too slow or costly to be worthwhile, rather than relying on the threat of retaliation, and the Article presents it as the least escalatory way to preserve crisis stability. It situates the analysis against an approaching strategic "event horizon," citing the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission's call for a "Quantum First by 2030" posture and parallel White House initiatives to secure critical inputs.
The LSI test
The central contribution is the LSI test, which asks whether any given control is least-trade-restrictive, security-sufficient, and innovation-preserving. The test is built to avoid two failure modes: over-securitization, which chills publication, standards leadership, and venture formation, and under-securitization, which leaks crown-jewel capabilities that are slow to reacquire. LSI is applied across a "pillarized" quantum stack—computing, sensing, simulation, networking, communication, quantum-AI hybrids, and enabling materials—and to its upstream dependencies in patent and trade-secret doctrine, government-funded IP and data rights, export controls, investment screening, and cryptographic baselines including post-quantum cryptography and crypto-agility. The framing borrows from physics with care: because the relevant systems are genuinely probabilistic, the Article uses the "Eight Worlds" scenario method to keep governance robust across divergent futures.
A coalition playbook against a "Silicon Curtain"
Rather than stop at theory, the Article assembles an implementable coalition playbook—administrable criteria, templates, and differentiated guardrails, including red-zone domains where denial is the default—and integrates instruments of economic statecraft such as a strategic critical-minerals reserve and a Quantum Criticality Index. Its closing warning is that mishandled securitization could raise a self-defeating "Silicon Curtain" between allied innovators; the constructive alternative is standards-first interoperability treated as a stabilizing feature of the international order. The work has been posted as a preprint on arXiv and is announced on AIRecht in the Nexus paper announcement.
Meer lezen