Berichten met de tag Policy

OECD Recommendation on Quantum Technologies Builds on Responsible Quantum Principles Developed at Stanford RQT

On May 28, 2026, the OECD Council adopted OECD/LEGAL/0508, the Recommendation of the Council on Quantum Technologies—the first intergovernmental standard to set shared principles for the responsible development and use of trusted quantum technologies. Its four high-level principles and five policy recommendations will read as familiar to anyone who has followed responsible-quantum scholarship, because the instrument's core ideas track work that the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology and its founder, Mauritz Kop, helped build over the previous half-decade.

The first intergovernmental quantum standard

Developed through a multistakeholder process—forty-seven experts from twenty-six nationalities across four scoping meetings in 2025, building on the OECD's January 2025 Quantum Technologies Policy Primer—the Recommendation asks all Actors to promote innovation that respects democratic values, to prevent and mitigate harms across the technology lifecycle, to promote secure and broad access, to facilitate collaboration, and to foster accountability and trustworthiness. It is non-binding but normatively weighty: thirty-eight adherents are now expected to implement it through their own legal frameworks. The OECD's broader responsible-quantum-technology agenda has long argued that the field needs exactly this kind of shared, anticipatory baseline.

A visible lineage, not a formal citation

The Recommendation names no academic source, and nothing in its text formally credits Stanford RQT. What it shows is conceptual lineage. Its lifecycle-embedded, values-first framing echoes the Ten Principles for Responsible Quantum Innovation; its post-quantum-cryptography and quantum-resilient-infrastructure language draws on the same concern with cryptanalysis that animated Kop's 2021 Yale legal-ethical framework; its accountability-and-trustworthiness principle parallels families in the World Economic Forum Quantum Computing Governance Principles he helped conceptualize; and its call for science-based standards mirrors the standards-first program he and colleagues set out in Science. Kop was among the experts consulted in the course of the OECD's quantum-policy work, an engagement that sits within a longer record of peer-reviewed calls for responsible quantum technology.

Why anticipation is the right posture

Both the Recommendation and the scholarship it echoes favor agile, forward-looking, evidence-based governance—and the physics explains why. Quantum technologies draw their power from superposition and entanglement, phenomena that do not scale gently: an entanglement-enabled sensor can cross a sensitivity threshold, and a cryptanalytically relevant machine can render trusted public-key cryptography suddenly breakable, in ways that arrive nonlinearly. Governance that waits for a capability to mature arrives too late by construction. This is the case the responsible-quantum field, including the Quantum-ELSPI research agenda, has pressed since 2021—and the case OECD/LEGAL/0508 now encodes for thirty-eight economies.

What comes next

The Recommendation tasks the OECD's Digital Policy Committee and Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy to develop practical guidance and to report back within five years, so the standard is built to evolve with the technology. Its arrival signals that these responsible-quantum arguments have reached the institutions that set international norms—a quiet but consequential validation of work begun years earlier at Stanford.

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Stanford RQT, Governance, Quantum TechnologyHenry Quentir28 mei 2026Mauritz Kop, Quantum Governance, Stanford RQT, Governance, Policy, Standards, Human Rights, Ethics, OECD, OECD-LEGAL-0508, Post-Quantum Cryptography, Anticipatory Governance, International Standards, Responsible Quantum Innovation

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 Kop5 mei 2026Mauritz Kop, Quantum Governance, Stanford RQT, Governance, Standards, Policy, IDC, PeerScape, Post-Quantum Cryptography, QT-QMS, Quantum Computing, Risk Management

StateScoop Interviews Mauritz Kop About Ohio House Bill 650 on Quantum Technology

When a statehouse starts asking serious questions about quantum computing, something has shifted. StateScoop—the Washington outlet that covers state and local government technology—has interviewed Mauritz Kop, Founder of the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology, about Ohio House Bill 650: legislation, passed unanimously by the Ohio House and now before the Senate, that would create a Frontier Technologies and Quantum Commission to study quantum computing, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and robotics, and report recommendations to the General Assembly by the end of 2026.

A statehouse turns to the quantum age

The commission would seat members of both chambers and draw on outside experts—an institutional answer to a structural problem. Emerging technologies now advance faster than traditional legislative cycles, and the gap between innovation and regulation widens every session a legislature waits. Ohio's answer is to build standing expertise before quantum systems are woven into procurement, infrastructure, and security frameworks, rather than legislating after the fact. It is, as Kop puts it in the interview, the role of state commissions to serve as "an essential laboratory for anticipatory governance."

Three messages from the interview

Kop's advice to Ohio distills into three propositions. First, anticipatory governance works: states that organize knowledge early write better rules later. Second, post-quantum cryptography migration is "really a country wide effort"—state agencies hold health records, tax data, and election infrastructure whose confidentiality must outlive the arrival of cryptographically relevant quantum machines, and migration timelines are measured in years, not budget cycles. Third, ethics embedded smartly in regulation does not slow innovation—it propels it, by giving industry predictable rules and the public reasons to trust what is being built.

Why state-level quantum policy matters now

Ohio is not moving alone. California, Texas, New Mexico, and Maryland have each launched quantum initiatives of their own, and the federal picture is evolving in parallel—terrain Kop knows from advising the U.S. Department of State on quantum technology and foreign policy strategy. The emerging pattern is federalism doing what it does best: fifty laboratories testing governance designs for a technology whose economic and security consequences will be national. The full StateScoop article includes Kop's remarks on commissions, cryptography, and the innovation case for ethics—and this post walks through its key arguments.

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Quantum Technology, Governance, PolicyHenry Quentir19 maart 2026Mauritz Kop, Quantum Governance, Policy, Regulation, Stanford RQT, Quantum Technology, Standards, StateScoop, Ohio House Bill 650, Post-Quantum Cryptography, Anticipatory Governance, State Legislation

An LSI Test for Securing the Quantum Industrial Commons

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.

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Quantum Technology, Intellectual Property, GeopoliticsHenry Quentir12 februari 2026Mauritz Kop, Quantum Governance, Intellectual Property, National Security, Stanford RQT, Geopolitics, Standards, Policy, LSI test, Deterrence by Denial, Quantum Industrial Commons, CIGI, Export Controls, Post-Quantum Cryptography, arXiv

GARP Interviews Mauritz Kop on Quantum Governance Strategies for Risk Professionals

The Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP) interviewed Mauritz Kop for David Weldon's article Full-Scale Quantum Computing May Be Years Away. Risk Mitigation Can't Wait.—bringing quantum governance to the desks of risk professionals worldwide.

Q-Day is the wrong question

Kop's message to the risk profession inverts the usual timeline anxiety. The immediate danger is not a cinematic moment when encryption falls; it is the quiet accumulation of harvested data—financial records, identity data, health and government archives—collected today for decryption tomorrow, compounded by weak vendor oversight and a lack of crypto-agility. Records that outlive their cryptography may already face that exposure, whatever the hardware roadmaps say.

Five must-haves for a quantum governance strategy

The strategy Kop laid out is deliberately operational: a PQC migration roadmap anchored in asset classification and harvest-now-decrypt-later exposure; board-level ownership; integration with existing cyber, model, and operational risk frameworks; vendor due diligence on quantum-safety claims; and independent testing and benchmarking instead of marketing trust. Layered across architecture, algorithms, and operations, it treats quantum as an extension of disciplines risk professionals already command—the same principles-to-practice arc as the global quantum policy brief he co-authored at CIGI.

From the trading floor to the boardroom

Quantum, Kop argues, is both threat and tool for finance: it endangers the confidentiality of everything archived, and it is being explored for better simulation, optimization, and risk discovery. His benchmark for the U.S.: core post-quantum migration substantially done before 2030 for long-lived data and critical systems. The institutions that will meet that deadline are the ones whose boards treat quantum readiness as governance, not as someone else's research project.

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Quantum Technology, Governance, CybersecurityMauritz Kop19 december 2025Mauritz Kop, Quantum Governance, Policy, Standards, Post-Quantum Cryptography, GARP, Risk Management, Financial Services, Crypto-Agility, Quantum Technology Impact Assessment

AI Regulation in California: The Daiki SB-53 Recipe for the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act

California's Senate Bill 53—the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act—is the first U.S. law aimed squarely at frontier AI models through a compute threshold. Daiki, the AI and quantum governance company co-founded by Mauritz Kop, has published a practical recipe for complying with it, and for turning compliance into governance capital.

From voluntary principles to enforceable rules

SB-53 marks the moment U.S. artificial intelligence regulation acquired teeth: a compute threshold of 10²⁶ floating-point operations, a "large frontier developer" category above USD 500 million in revenue, published Frontier AI Frameworks, transparency reports on deployment, critical-incident reporting on a fifteen-day (sometimes twenty-four-hour) clock, whistleblower protections, and Attorney General penalties of up to USD 1 million per violation. Most obligations apply from January 1, 2026—which makes readiness a present-tense question, not a planning horizon. Kop has engaged U.S. lawmakers on these trajectories, including consulting Senator Mark Warner on AI and quantum technology policy.

Six steps to SB-53 readiness

The Daiki recipe walks an organization from applicability analysis (model inventory, compute estimation, revenue exposure) through a standards-based governance baseline on ISO/IEC 42001 and the NIST AI RMF, the design of an operational Frontier AI Framework, repeatable transparency-report workflows, incident and whistleblower pipelines, and finally harmonization with the EU AI Act and other regimes—one governance system, not a stack of statute-shaped silos.

Why boards should care

The deeper argument is strategic: a frontier-AI law built on evidence-generating transparency rewards organizations that can prove their safety practices. Boards that treat SB-53 as an opportunity to institutionalize frontier-grade discipline—rather than as an isolated burden—convert a regulatory deadline into trust, resilience, and license to operate.

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Artificial Intelligence, American Law, GovernanceMauritz Kop1 december 2025Mauritz Kop, AI, Regulation, Policy, Daiki, California SB-53, TFAIA, Frontier AI, AI Safety, ISO/IEC 42001, NIST AI RMF

Mauritz Kop Speaker at United Nations International Year of Quantum Science and Technology 2025

On 31 October 2025, Mauritz Kop, Founder of Stanford RQT (Responsible Quantum Technology), served as one of the main speakers at the North America regional workshop on the Ethical, Legal, and Social Aspects (ELSA) of Broadening Global Ownership of Quantum Technologies. The online workshop was part of the United Nations International Year of Quantum Science and Technology 2025 (IYQ 2025), a year-long initiative mandated by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and led by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to mark 100 years of quantum mechanics and to address the emerging “quantum divide” in access, skills, and infrastructure.

The North America edition was convened by Dr. Zeki C. Seskir and Professor Shohini Ghose as part of a six-region ELSA-of-quantum workshop series. Each regional workshop is feeding into a global IYQ event on the Ethical, Legal, and Social Aspects of Broadening Global Ownership of Quantum Technologies to be held in Istanbul in November 2025.

The program brought together four principal speakers—Mauritz Kop, Bruna Shinohara de Mendonça, Lindsay Rand, and Isabelle Lacroix—and designated commentators Rodrigo Araiza Bravo and Karl Thibault. The workshop closed with an open discussion in which participants reflected on regional needs, expected impact, and the kind of alignment that is necessary for a fair and secure quantum future.

The International Year of Quantum and the North America ELSA Workshop

The International Year of Quantum Science and Technology 2025 was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in June 2024. The resolution calls on states and international organizations to use 2025 to raise public awareness of quantum science, promote education and capacity-building—especially in the Global South—and strengthen cooperation so that all countries can participate in and benefit from quantum technologies.

Within this broader mandate, the ELSA of Broadening Global Ownership of Quantum Technologies initiative focuses on quantum governance. The North America workshop was explicitly framed around three questions:

Which ethical, legal, and social aspects of quantum technologies are most urgent for North America today?
Which ELSA topics are most important globally?
How should the future of ELSA and related policy implications be shaped in Europe, North America, and worldwide, and what forms of alignment are needed?

The three-hour program opened with an overview of the IYQ ELSA event series, followed by the four invited talks, a short break, and then a structured discussion and closing reflections.

From ELSA to ELSPI: A Metaparadigm for Quantum Governance

Kop’s keynote, “From ELSA to ELSPI: A Metaparadigm for Quantum Governance,” drew on his recent work on Quantum-ELSPI and Responsible Quantum Technology, including Quantum-ELSPI: A Novel Field of Research; Ten Principles for Responsible Quantum Innovation (co-authored with, among others, Raymond Laflamme); and his legislative blueprint Towards a European Quantum Act.

He began by defining Quantum-ELSPI (co-developed with Luciano Floridi then at Oxford, now at Yale) as the study of Ethical, Legal, Socio-economic, and Policy Implications of quantum technologies. Classical ELSA—Ethical, Legal, and Social Aspects—was designed for more conventional technologies and, in his view, is too narrow for quantum systems that combine:

Dual-use components that can be deployed for both civilian and military purposes;
Long security horizons, where sensitive data captured today may be decrypted decades later by cryptanalytically relevant quantum computers; and
Fragile supply chains, in which a handful of materials, cryogenic systems, or photonic components create systemic bottlenecks.

To address this, Kop articulated three foundational pillars of the Quantum-ELSPI metaparadigm, developed in a recent Science article with co-authors Mateo Aboy, Urs Gasser, Glenn Cohen, and others:

Standards-First Governance
Technical and assurance standards—such as post-quantum cryptography (PQC) profiles, quantum quality-management systems, and certification schemes—are treated as the primary vehicle for embedding values into systems. Law, policy, and institutional design are built around these standards rather than attempting to regulate hypothetical risks in the abstract.
Execution-Oriented Ethics
Ethics is framed as a delivery problem. Instead of high-level value statements, Kop emphasized auditable supply chains, post-quantum cryptography migration drills, and verifiable deployment metrics in sectors such as finance, health care, and government archives. Ethics, in this sense, is measured by what actually ships and how it behaves under stress.
Planetary Welfare
The third pillar reframes quantum technologies not only as instruments of national competitiveness or military advantage, but as ecological and health technologies. Quantum-ELSPI is thus aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), emphasizing applications in climate modeling, clean-energy materials discovery, quantum-enabled medical technologies, and resilient humanitarian communications.

Taken together, these pillars elevate Quantum-ELSPI from a narrow ethics add-on to a metaparadigm for governing the entire quantum stack—from materials and cryogenic infrastructure to cloud-based access, algorithms, and hybrid quantum–classical systems.

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Governance, Quantum ELSPI, Stanford RQTMauritz Kop31 oktober 2025United Nations, Quantum-ELSPI, Ethics, Law, Policy, Governance, UNESCO, OECD, IYQ 2025, Geopolitics, Societal Impact, Innovation, Science, Mauritz Kop, Stanford RQT

Mauritz Kop Teaches Quantum Governance at the United States Air Force Academy

Mauritz Kop, Founder of the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology, returned to the United States Air Force Academy—where he serves as guest professor—to teach cadets a class titled Responsible Quantum Technology: Establishing a Legal-Ethical Framework. The session began with the physics and moved to the geostrategic, legal, and ethical architecture the field will need as it matures, addressing two questions the cadets had prepared: why govern quantum before it is mature, and what framework best balances innovation against risk.

From the mechanics to the law

The lecture grounded its policy argument in the physics of the second quantum revolution. Where classical systems encode definite bits, quantum systems exploit superposition, entanglement, and tunneling to unlock new categories of capability across computing, sensing, simulation, and networking—from drug discovery and novel materials to jam-resistant navigation and physically grounded secure communications. The same properties that make the technology powerful, Kop argued, strain a legal order built on certainty, locality, and linear causality, which is why quantum governance calls for a tailored, sui generis approach rather than a retrofit of existing rules. The themes extend the line of work Kop set out in Establishing a Legal-Ethical Framework for Quantum Technology.

Why govern before maturity

On the cadets' first question, Kop drew on the Collingridge dilemma—control is easiest early, when knowledge is limited but options remain open—and on his metaphor of a quantum event horizon, a threshold beyond which technological lock-in makes the path far harder to redirect. Acting while the technology is still malleable, he argued, is not a brake on innovation but a precondition for steering it toward democratic values, public trust, and the legal certainty that long-horizon research and investment depend on.

A two-pillar framework

To the second question, Kop offered an integrated two-pillar response: agile, risk-based regulation that tiers obligations by an application's risk, paired with a strategic industrial and security policy that builds national capacity—funding across the lab-to-market pipeline, supply-chain resilience for critical minerals and components, talent development, and shared research infrastructure. This is the operational form of the Responsible Quantum Technology framework, organized under the SEA principles of safeguarding, engaging, and advancing the technology, and aimed at steering innovation rather than slowing it.

Dual-use and deterrence

For future Air Force and Space Force officers, the dual-use character of quantum technology was the connecting thread. The most acute near-term concern is the cryptographic threat—"Q-Day" and "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later"—which makes the migration to post-quantum cryptography a present-tense security task. Set against great-power competition, Kop's prescription is deliberate stewardship: embedding democratic values into standards early, protecting research from state-sponsored theft, and cooperating with allies, themes he has also brought to venues including the Hoover Institution. The class closed on the conviction that technology's trajectory is a matter of choice, and that engaging its technical, strategic, legal, and ethical dimensions is a core professional responsibility for the officers who will shape these systems.

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Teaching, Quantum Technology, GovernanceMauritz Kop23 oktober 2025Mauritz Kop, Quantum Governance, Stanford RQT, National Security, Governance, Policy, Quantum-ELSPI, Standards, US Air Force Academy, Teaching, Dual-Use, Post-Quantum Cryptography

EU AI Act Compliance for Global Enterprises: The Daiki Solution for Mandatory AI Governance

The European Union's AI Act has crossed the line from proposal to binding law, and its phased rollout is now an active clock rather than a distant horizon. Daiki, the AI and quantum governance company co-founded by Mauritz Kop, has published an account of what mandatory AI governance demands of global enterprises—and how an integrated, standards-based platform can convert that obligation into a strategic advantage.

A calendar that has already started

The Act entered into force on August 1, 2024. The prohibition on unacceptable-risk practices took effect in February 2025; obligations for general-purpose AI models began in August 2025; and full application—conformity assessments, CE marking, EU-database registration, post-market monitoring for high-risk systems—arrives on August 2, 2026, with a final grace period for regulated-product components running to 2027. Because the Act binds any provider whose systems reach the EU market or whose outputs are used within it, its reach is extraterritorial: a firm headquartered in New York or Singapore is squarely within scope, and penalties of up to €35 million or 7% of worldwide turnover make non-compliance a board-level risk.

The pyramid of criticality

The Act's organizing idea is a risk-based pyramid: unacceptable-risk practices are banned; high-risk systems—reaching common enterprise uses in hiring, credit scoring, and critical infrastructure—carry the heaviest lifecycle obligations; limited-risk systems owe transparency; and minimal-risk applications attract no new mandates. The Daiki solution operationalizes that structure, classifying each system through a rules engine aligned with the Act's definitions and Annex III, then triggering a workflow proportionate to its tier, with every action logged to an auditable evidence trail. Its architecture is anchored in ISO/IEC 42001, bridged to the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, and bounded throughout by deliberate human oversight—mirroring the Act's own Article 14.

A risk-based reading with a documented lineage

The post's central reading—that a risk-based regime rewards organizations able to prove their governance—has a clear history in Kop's scholarship. As Mauritz Kop's record of work shows, his 2021 analysis of the EU AI Act anticipated the four-tier architecture that is now law, and the same logic carries across the Atlantic to California's compute-threshold approach for frontier models. For general counsel and compliance leaders, the practical takeaway is consistent: build one coherent, standards-based governance system now—rather than a reactive checklist per statute—and the era of enforcement will reward exactly the discipline the era of voluntary principles merely recommended. Mandatory AI governance, as the post observes, is here to stay; the enterprises that treat it as design rather than damage control will be the trusted artificial intelligence leaders of the regulated decade ahead.

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Artificial Intelligence, European Law, GovernanceMauritz Kop23 juni 2025Mauritz Kop, AI, Regulation, Policy, Governance, Standards, Daiki, EU AI Act, AI Governance, ISO/IEC 42001, NIST AI RMF, Brussels Effect, Risk-Based Regulation, Frontier AI

The US ISO 42001 Standards-Centric Approach to AI Governance: Compliance, Trust, and Innovation (Daiki Repost)

AIRecht reposts, in full and with permission, a Daiki essay by Mauritz Kop, Co-Founder, on why the United States is converging on a standards-centric model of artificial intelligence governance—and why ISO/IEC 42001 has become its anchor. The repost is presented as published on May 13, 2025, with its original spellings, figures, and references intact.

A standards-first answer to a fragmented regime

The American approach to AI is, by design, light on binding federal statute and heavy on voluntary, risk-based guidance: the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, sector-specific direction from the FTC, EEOC, and FDA, and a patchwork of state laws. Into that fragmentation steps ISO/IEC 42001, the world's first international standard for AI Management Systems, published in December 2023. The essay's argument is that a single, certifiable management system can do what a stack of statute-shaped checklists cannot—give an organization one coherent governance posture that travels across jurisdictions.

The transatlantic bridge

The stakes are clearest for U.S. companies selling into Europe. ISO 42001 certification is not the same as EU AI Act compliance, but the two overlap heavily on risk management, data governance, transparency, documentation, and human oversight—precisely the obligations the Act imposes on high-risk systems. The repost frames the standard as a "common language" that lets a U.S. firm demonstrate diligence to European regulators and partners without building a separate compliance machine for each market. It is the same standards-first logic Kop and colleagues have argued for in quantum governance, where international standards substitute for legislation that has not yet caught up to the technology.

From paperwork to governance asset

The closing move is strategic rather than procedural. Under an anticipated period of U.S. federal deregulation, the essay contends, a globally recognized standard offers stability that domestic political cycles cannot: a baseline of good governance that holds regardless of which executive orders survive. The Daiki method then operationalizes that posture through six integrated components—an AI system registry, an EU AI Act toolkit, an ISO 42001 implementation framework, ISO 27001 data-security integration, MDR/ISO 13485 support for medical AI, and a responsible generative-AI framework—so overlapping requirements are managed once, not many times. The throughline connects to Daiki's wider body of work on operationalizing regulation, including its EU AI Act compliance solution and its quantum-governance recipe.

Why repost it here

For boards, general counsel, and AI program leads, the practical message is that the era of principles is giving way to an era of evidence: organizations will increasingly be asked to prove their governance, not merely assert it. Reposting the essay in full preserves Kop's argument verbatim while placing it alongside AIRecht's running coverage of Mauritz Kop's work at the intersection of AI, standards, and responsible technology governance.

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Towards an Atomic Agency for Quantum-AI

Stanford, CA May 5, 2025 — Today, Mauritz Kop published interdisciplinary research proposing “A Principled Approach to Quantum Technologies”, and the establishment of an “Atomic Agency for Quantum-AI” on the website of the European Commission. The Atomic Agency essay analyzes emerging AI and quantum technology (including their increasing complementarity and interdependence embodied in quantum-AI hybrids) regulation, export controls, and technical standards in the U.S., EU, and China, comparing legislative efforts anno 2025 to strategically balance the benefits and risks of these transformative technologies through the lens of their distinct innovation systems. The Principled Approach paper posits that quantum technology's dual use character brings with it the need to balance maximizing benefits with mitigating risks. In this spirit, the paper argues that quantum technology development should best be guided by a framework for Responsible Quantum Technology, operationalized by a set of tailored principles to optimize risk-benefit curves. Download the paper here.

Towards an Atomic Agency for Quantum-AI

The article analyzes emerging regulation, export controls, and technical standards for both quantum and AI (including their increasing complementarity and interdependence embodied in quantum-AI hybrids) in the U.S., EU, and China and offers novel conceptual frameworks to steward these technologies towards shared global benefit.

Key Takeaways:

1. Converging Need for Responsible Governance: Despite distinct innovation philosophies (market-driven in the U.S., values-based in the EU, and state-driven in China), there's a growing international consensus on the necessity for principled and responsible technology governance for both AI and quantum technologies.

2. The 'Washington Effect' vs. 'Beijing Effect': The U.S.'s security-centric policies are creating a de facto "Washington effect," potentially setting global rules for quantum law but risking premature regulation. Conversely, China's push for state-aligned standardization (e.g., via the Digital Silk Road) signals a "Beijing effect," which could export autocratic norms and fragment global interoperability, a trend exacerbated by unilateral export controls.

3. Potential U.S., EU and China Visions on a Quantum Governance Act: Given the distinct innovation ecosystems and strategic priorities of the United States, the European Union, and China, it is instructive to envision how each might hypothetically structure a dedicated legislative framework for quantum technologies. The research outlines hypothetical "Quantum Governance Acts" for each, reflecting their respective governance philosophies and innovation models, while also considering pathways towards greater international alignment based on shared values:

a. United States: Removing Barriers for U.S. Quantum Technology Act (deregulation, industrial standards-centric approach, Safeguarding through Advancing quantum technology, prioritizing market dynamism, national & economic security, and defense).

b. European Union: EU Quantum Act (harmonized regulation rooted in fundamental rights and societal benefit based on New Legislative Framework while incorporating elements from European Chips Act, renewed focus on defense via “European DARPA”).

c. China: Comprehensive Quantum Law (Safeguarding state control while Advancing state goals, blending elements of authoritarian governance with surveillance capitalism, integration of civilian and military sectors, self-reliance, exporting state norms & values through technical standards).

4. Global Challenges & Opportunities for Alignment: Faced with planetary challenges like disease, inequality and climate change, aligning on Responsible Quantum Technology (RQT) norms and standards is a critical global opportunity. The article cautions against a simplistic zero-sum game or Cold-War redux narrative for quantum competition, arguing it hinders vital international cooperation.

5. Quantum-Relativistic Innovation Theory of Everything: Philosophical thought experiment to understand innovation dynamics by drawing analogies from quantum mechanics (uncertainty, superposition at micro-level) and general relativity (context, structure at macro-level), theories about the fundamental nature of reality.

6. Smart Regulation and RQT by Design: Effective governance must move beyond mere restrictions to actively incentivize responsible behaviors, promoting "Responsible Quantum Technology (RQT) by design" through flexible instruments like Quantum Impact Assessments (QIA), RQT by design metrics, adaptive, modular legislation, & regulatory sandboxes.

7. Harmonized "Quantum Acquis Planétaire": The article advocates for a global body of Quantum Law ("Quantum Acquis Planétaire"), complemented by sector-specific practices. Such a quantum acquis would be anchored in universal ethical values and translated into foundational standards and agile legal guardrails. This requires inter-continental policymaking and strategic "recoupling" between major players like the U.S. and China, based on incentives and shared values (“what connects us” – e.g. human dignity, security, well-being).

8. An "Atomic Agency for Quantum-AI": A central proposal is the establishment of an international agency modeled after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This body would aim to enforce a global acquis, deter a quantum arms race, ensure non-proliferation of dual-use quantum-AI technologies via safeguards implementation (inspired by nuclear governance), and potentially oversee a global UN Quantum Treaty.

9. Need for International Collaboration & Research Platforms: Realizing ambitious goals like fault-tolerant quantum centric supercomputing, and scalable topological qudits unlocking higher-dimensional quantum systems leveraging multi-level logic, requires collective global expertise and collaborative research platforms akin to CERN or ITER, challenging protectionist measures that stifle necessary cooperation. Immediate global actions should focus on leveraging quantum for the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), mitigating a 'Quantum Divide,' promoting quantum literacy, and building a skilled quantum workforce.

The research underscores the urgent need for robust global quantum-AI governance structures and calls for a shift from purely competitive dynamics towards pragmatic cooperation and the codification of a harmonized global framework.

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Mauritz Kop Delivers Keynote on Global Quantum Governance Frameworks at the World Quantum Summit in Washington DC

At the World Quantum Summit in Washington, DC, held during DC Climate Week on May 2, 2025, Mauritz Kop, Founder of the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology, delivered a keynote on Global Quantum Governance Frameworks. The address landed in a symbolic year—the centennial of quantum mechanics and the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology—and made a single, sustained argument: that quantum's distinctive physics demands tailored governance, and that the world should cooperate to unlock quantum for societal progress rather than fracture into rival blocs.

A fragmented compliance web—and a standards-first answer

Kop's diagnosis is that developers of quantum and hybrid systems already face a fragmented web of regional and global requirements, from export controls to sector-specific rules supported by standards, certifications, and quality-management systems. His remedy is unified quantum interoperability standards to avert a "quantum splinternet," paired with the Responsible Quantum Technology (RQT) framework and its benchmarks. This standards-first posture—building technical consensus before locking in less adaptable legislation—runs through his scholarship on responsible quantum innovation, including the Ten Principles for Responsible Quantum Innovation published in IOP Quantum Science and Technology.

Benefits, risks, and Quantum-ELSPI

The keynote mapped quantum's promise and peril by domain. On the benefit side, Kop aligned responsible quantum innovation with the UN Sustainable Development Goals—drug discovery, weather forecasting, battery chemistry, carbon capture. On the risk side, he flagged "Q-day," when current RSA and AES encryption fails, alongside dual-use ambiguity in quantum simulation and sensing. These interrelated ethical, legal, socio-economic, and policy implications form what he calls Quantum-ELSPI, the lens through which he argues quantum should be governed in line with civil liberties, human rights, and the rule of law.

An Atomic Agency for the quantum age

The address built toward an institutional proposal: a globally harmonized "Quantum Acquis Planétaire," a UN Quantum Treaty modeled on the 2024 UN AI Resolution and the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and an "Atomic Agency for Quantum/AI" inspired by the IAEA's safeguards model, complemented by CERN-style international resource pooling. The keynote is distinct from Kop's role as a speaker for the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology 2025: that recognition concerns the year's designation, whereas this address sets out the specific governance architecture he believes the quantum age now requires. His central claim is that the architecture must be designed today—before second-generation, agentic quantum and AI systems outpace the law—and that it should be standards-first, rights-respecting, and global by construction, so that quantum technology serves a collective future of widespread, equitably distributed prosperity.

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

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