Berichten in Governance

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

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 Quentir27 april 2026Stanford 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

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 Quentir20 april 2026Mauritz 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

Quantum Nexus LSI Test Published by Vanderbilt JET Law

Most technology law arrives too late: the architecture ships, the market consolidates, and legislators are left regulating what already exists. A new essay in Vanderbilt's Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law argues that quantum technology presents the opposite—and far rarer—situation, and explains what the law should do with it. Quantum law is being written before quantum technology has fully arrived, and that timing is not a defect to apologize for but an opportunity to seize.

A test with three prongs

At the center of the essay stands the LSI test, a doctrinal instrument for dual-use governance that asks of every state intervention whether it is the least trade-restrictive, security-sufficient, and innovation-preserving measure available. The shift in emphasis is subtle but consequential: the question is no longer whether a government possesses a restrictive tool—export control, outbound investment screening, patent secrecy—but whether it is deploying the narrowest one that actually works. Between the romantics of total openness and the reflexes of total restriction, the test stakes out a defensible middle ground the essay calls security-sufficient openness.

Patents and export controls, one system

The essay's second contribution is diagnostic. Intellectual property and national security are conventionally treated as separate fields with separate experts and separate statutes. In quantum practice they behave as one entangled legal control plane: a single patent disclosure can simultaneously raise eligibility questions under Alice, research-security questions under the export-control regime, and commercialization questions under Bayh-Dole and the federal acquisition rules. Reading them together is not an academic nicety—it is the only way to see where over-securitization would quietly strangle the startups, standards participation, and allied interoperability on which democratic quantum leadership depends, a dynamic explored across the MINDS quantum strategy research at CIGI.

From a six-paragraph essay to a coalition playbook

Behind the essay stands the full Quantum Nexus Article—a book-length treatment on arXiv that develops the LSI test into an implementable coalition playbook: empirically anchored criteria, differentiated guardrails with red-zone domains where denial is the default, and secure closed-loop enclaves for high-sensitivity collaborative research. The stakes are framed without euphemism: U.S. assessments now call for a Quantum First posture by 2030, China's program advances under military-civil fusion, and the choice before democratic legislators is whether the coming wall of quantum regulation will be disciplined by doctrine or improvised under pressure. For lawyers, the essay is a preview of their next decade; for policymakers, it is a usable standard; and for the quantum community, it is an argument that the rules now being written deserve the same precision as the systems they will govern.

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Intellectual Property, Quantum Technology, GovernanceHenry Quentir9 april 2026Intellectual Property, National Security, Dual-Use, Export Controls, Patents, Quantum Governance, Stanford RQT, CIGI, Mauritz Kop, LSI Test, Vanderbilt JETLaw, Quantum Nexus

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

Harvard Law Publishes Hippocratic Quantum: The Ethics of Biomedical Discovery in the Quantum Age

Cambridge, MA, February 25, 2026—Harvard Law’s Petrie-Flom Center has published Mauritz Kop’s new article, Hippocratic Quantum: The Ethics of Biomedical Discovery in the Quantum Age:https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2026/02/25/hippocratic-quantum-the-ethics-of-biomedical-discovery-in-the-quantum-age/

The article advances a proposition that is becoming increasingly difficult for health lawyers, policymakers, and biomedical innovators to ignore: as quantum technologies begin to enter biomedical discovery, the decisive challenge is no longer only scientific capability, but rather governance. In Kop’s account, quantum-enabled medicine should not be understood as a distant or speculative frontier that can be regulated later, once the engineering settles. It should instead be approached as a present-tense quantum governance problem, one that already implicates patient confidentiality, data integrity, cyber resilience, export controls, supply chains, and the geostrategic value of biomedical knowledge.

The article’s answer is not a new morality, but a more demanding implementation of an existing one: quantum medicine requires a Hippocratic framework that is technical enough for engineers, legal enough for regulators, and concrete enough for hospitals and pharmaceutical firms, yet flexible enough to let innovation breathe and encourage the crucial public-private investment necessary to advance allied quantum capabilities.

Five examples of quantum-enabled biomedical innovations

To ground this institutional view, one must consider the specific technological capabilities currently transitioning from theoretical physics to applied biomedicine. Five feasible vectors of innovation illustrate the breadth of this shift. In the domain of quantum computing, hybrid classical-quantum algorithms are emerging to optimize complex drug discovery pipelines and process large-scale genomic datasets. In quantum sensing, technologies such as diamond nitrogen-vacancy magnetometry enable ultra-sensitive, room-temperature mapping of neurological and cardiac activity. For quantum simulation, researchers are utilizing qubit-based systems to model molecular interactions and drug-target binding affinities with high accuracy, aiming to reduce reliance on extensive physical wet-lab screening. Within quantum imaging, techniques leveraging entangled photons permit the high-resolution visualization of cellular structures at lower light intensities, thereby mitigating phototoxicity in living tissues, benefitting medical diagnosis. Finally, in quantum networking, the deployment of quantum key distribution protocols offers a mechanism to cryptographically secure the transmission of sensitive multi-omics data across distributed hospital and research architectures.

From legal-ethical framework to Quantum-ELSPI

The Harvard article is best read as part of a longer intellectual trajectory. An early expression of that project appeared in March 2021 in the Yale Journal of Law & Technology, in Establishing a Legal-Ethical Framework for Quantum Technology: https://yjolt.org/blog/establishing-legal-ethical-framework-quantum-technology

That Yale piece argued that quantum technologies were moving from hypothetical ideas to commercial realities, and that law and policy should not wait for full technical maturity before building governance tools. It proposed a culturally sensitive legal-ethical framework for applied quantum technologies, drawing on AI governance and nanotechnology’s ELSI tradition while recognizing the distinct physical characteristics of quantum systems. Crucially, it also insisted that ethical aspiration must be accompanied by practical mechanisms for monitoring, validation, and life-cycle risk management. In retrospect, many of the themes that now reappear in Hippocratic Quantum were already visible there: the concern for human-centered design, the call for risk-based governance, and the insistence that ethics without institutionalization would be inadequate.

Why quantum medicine changes the governance question

The new Harvard article narrows the focus to biomedicine, but in doing so it sharpens the stakes. Biomedical discovery is not simply another application area. It is a setting in which long-lived and highly sensitive data, bodily integrity, public-health interests, commercial incentives, and geopolitical competition intersect. Quantum technologies matter here not because they promise speculative disruption, but because they may incrementally and then materially improve specific tasks: hybrid quantum-classical computational chemistry, de novo molecular design, lead optimization, selected toxicity and metabolism modeling, and perhaps aspects of high-fidelity sensing, simulation, and networked quantum computation. The issue, then, is not whether every promise will be realized immediately. It is whether institutions are preparing now for the forms of capability that are already foreseeable.

A Harvard-facing research arc

This Harvard publication also extends a longer Harvard-facing research arc across AI, health law, and responsible quantum governance. That arc includes:

The Right To Process Data For Machine Learning Purposes In The EU (Harvard JOLT) https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/the-right-to-process-data-for-machine-learning-purposes-in-the-eu
Towards Responsible Quantum Technology (Harvard Berkman Klein) https://cyber.harvard.edu/publication/2023/towards-responsible-quantum-technology
EU And US Regulatory Challenges Facing AI Health Care Innovator Firms (Harvard Petrie-Flom) https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2024/04/04/eu-and-us-regulatory-challenges-facing-ai-health-care-innovator-firms/
A Brief Quantum Medicine Policy Guide (Harvard Petrie-Flom) https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2024/12/06/a-brief-quantum-medicine-policy-guide/
How Quantum Technologies May Be Integrated Into Healthcare: What Regulators Should Consider (Stanford Law) https://hls.harvard.edu/bibliography/how-quantum-technologies-may-be-integrated-into-healthcare-what-regulators-should-consider/

Seen in this broader context, Hippocratic Quantum brings together early legal-ethical framing, responsible quantum governance, healthcare regulation, and geopolitical analysis into a single biomedical governance argument.

The article has also been featured by The Quantum Insider, which highlighted its central argument that quantum medicine’s promise must be matched by stronger privacy and governance safeguards: https://thequantuminsider.com/2026/02/27/analysis-quantum-medicines-promise-raises-new-privacy-and-governance-risks/

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Mauritz Kop Principal Investigator of MINDS Quantum Strategy Grant at CIGI

Waterloo, February 18, 2026—The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) has awarded Mauritz Kop a new leadership role as Principal Investigator (incoming) of a MINDS Targeted Engagement Grant on Quantum Strategy. The grant advances a central proposition of his recent work: quantum technologies are no longer best understood as a narrow scientific frontier or a conventional innovation file. They have become a strategic domain in which law, industrial policy, intellectual property, defense planning, and geopolitical competition now converge.

That convergence matters because quantum capability is being built in an era of systemic rivalry, supply-chain vulnerability, and technological coercion. In that environment, democratic states cannot afford to treat quantum merely as a research ecosystem problem. They must govern it as part of a broader strategy for safeguarding the democratic industrial commons: the shared base of talent, infrastructure, know-how, trusted supply chains, standards, and institutions on which long-run security, prosperity, and coalition advantage depend.

What MINDS in Defence and Security Is and Why This Grant Fits

The MINDS program—Mobilizing Insights in Defence and Security—is a Canadian Department of National Defence initiative designed to strengthen evidence-based defense policy thinking and foster the next generation of defense and security experts. Its Targeted Engagement Grants provide non-recurring support for projects such as workshops, roundtables, research, and publications, and they are assessed primarily against the annual Defence Policy Challenges.

The current 2025-2026 MINDS challenge set is especially well aligned with the subject matter of this grant. The official challenge framework emphasizes several critical priorities: securing Canada’s sovereignty and continental defense posture; attracting advanced-technology talent across the defense sector; and strengthening the defense industrial base through resilient supply chains and dual-use technologies such as quantum and artificial intelligence. Furthermore, the framework addresses the pressures of strategic competition—including adversarial exploitation of vulnerabilities—and the accelerating adoption of pan-domain, emerging technologies where interoperability, trust, and responsible governance must be preserved.

Strategic Leadership and Human Capital

Kop’s fellowship at CIGI has centered on the governance of transformative technologies, especially quantum technology, AI, dual-use export controls, national security, and intellectual property. The new grant builds directly on that portfolio, but with a more operational mandate. As incoming Principal Investigator, his role will be to provide the project’s strategic and intellectual leadership: conceptualizing the workshop, defining the central themes and policy questions, structuring the panels for direct relevance to Canadian defense audiences, chairing the main event, moderating key expert sessions, identifying high-level contributors, and guiding the project’s analytical outputs.

The Quantum Nexus Paper Behind the Grant

The grant builds on Kop’s recent paper, The Nexus of Quantum Technology, Intellectual Property, and National Security: An LSI Test for Securing the Quantum Industrial Commons, now available on arXiv.

In that paper, he argues that quantum technologies have moved from laboratory structures to the geopolitical stage, and that democratic states therefore need a governance model that is neither naively open nor reflexively protectionist. The paper's contribution is an implementable coalition playbook, offering empirically anchored criteria, templates, and differentiated guardrails - including red zone domains where denial is the default - to avoid both over-securitization and under-securitization. Properly applied, LSI reduces the risk of a self-defeating hard decoupling from China while establishing standards-first interoperability as a stabilizing eigenstate of the international order and enabling RQT by design to shape trusted adoption pathways beyond the coalition, including in the majority world.

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CIGI Publishes Global Quantum Policy Brief by Mauritz Kop and Tracey Forrest

Waterloo, 5 February 2026—The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) has published a new policy brief, Global Quantum Governance: From Principles to Practice, authored by Mauritz Kop and Tracey Forrest. The brief is written for policy makers, regulators, standards bodies, and industry actors facing a practical transition: quantum technologies are moving from laboratory milestones toward deployment pathways where governance choices—especially around cybersecurity and cross-border infrastructure—become difficult to reverse.

Download the Policy Brief here: https://www.cigionline.org/documents/3746/PB_No.222_Kop_and_Forrest.pdf

Why this brief on quantum governance, and why now

The brief’s central timing claim is that near-term milestones—particularly post-quantum cryptography (PQC) migration and quantum networking—create a governance tipping point. After that point, certain security and societal harms may be costly (or impossible) to remediate. In the brief’s framing, PQC migration is not merely an engineering update; it is a “temporal rights and resilience” imperative because present-day decisions about crypto-agility, key life-cycle management, and data minimization determine whether sensitive data remains protected against future adversaries.

This urgency is paired with a structural diagnosis: national initiatives—including the EU’s proposed Quantum Act—are important, but insufficient on their own given quantum’s dual-use characteristics, global supply chains, and asymmetric capabilities across states and firms. The authors argue for a governance architecture that is “standards-first” and internationally coordinated, capable of sustaining what they call “security-sufficient openness,” and overseen by an International Quantum Agency.

The brief’s recommendations in practical terms

The brief concludes with a multi-pronged path “from principles to practice,” emphasizing four implementable priorities:

Strengthen foundations through standards and PQC execution: align cryptographic profiles across sectors; update procurement so crypto-agility, key life-cycle management, and “harvest now, decrypt later” mitigation become baseline requirements; and adopt “cryptographic resilience” via agile standards, testing, and incident playbooks.
Harmonize among allies: coordinate export controls, investment screening, and supply-chain security via mechanisms such as a proposed G7 Quantum Technology Point of Contact Group and narrowly scoped license-exception approaches in Five Eyes/AUKUS-style arrangements, while avoiding poorly designed measures that impose high compliance costs and chill benign collaboration.
Incentivize global collaboration and capacity building: federate national quantum clouds, SDG-oriented demonstrators, and regional test networks under common governance rules; and consider, longer-term, a “CERN for Quantum” that provides shared access anchored in transparency and equitable access, including for Global South partners.
Institutionalize foresight and bounded algorithmic regulation: resource international foresight capacities—within an IQA-type body or linked observatories—to update risk scenarios and stress-test legal frameworks, while experimenting with limited, well-governed AI-assisted monitoring and red-teaming to inform accountable human decision makers.

Takeaway for AIRecht’s readership

For legal and policy practitioners, the brief’s message is that quantum governance is entering a phase where operational artifacts—standards, benchmarks, procurement baselines, and interoperability profiles—will increasingly determine real-world rights, liabilities, and security outcomes. PQC migration and quantum networking are treated as the near-term proving ground for whether democracies can coordinate “security-sufficient openness” at scale.

For innovators and investors, the brief underscores that governance is not a brake on quantum progress but a design constraint that—if addressed early—can preserve global interoperability, reduce fragmentation, and support responsible diffusion of quantum capability without deepening geopolitical divides.

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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

War on the Rocks Publishes "A Bletchley Park for the Quantum Age"

Washington DC, Nov. 6, 2025—War on the Rocks has published a major new commentary by Stanford RQT’s Mauritz Kop, titled “A Bletchley Park for the Quantum Age.” The article translates his broader research on quantum governance into a concrete, operational blueprint for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) migration across the United States and its allies.

Appearing in a venue read closely by practitioners in defence, intelligence, and foreign policy, the piece draws a deliberate conceptual line from the World War II codebreaking effort at Bletchley Park to today’s challenge of securing democratic communications. It argues that Bletchley Park was more than a geographic location; it was a method—an integrated system of science, engineering, operations, and alliance management. Kop contends that a similar methodology is required now to protect national security systems against cryptanalytically relevant quantum computers.

The Enigma Machine utilized a complex series of electromechanical rotors to produce a polyalphabetic substitution cipher, creating an encryption standard that was widely deemed unbreakable by contemporary adversaries. Defeating this system required the Allies to operationalize abstract mathematics into industrial capability, a feat that fundamentally altered the trajectory of the war.

The article situates PQC migration not as a narrow information technology upgrade, but as a core tenet of United States and allied quantum-AI grand strategy. It highlights how flagship programmes such as the United States Department of Defense’s Replicator initiative must be made “quantum-ready” to avoid becoming silently obsolete once large-scale quantum computers arrive.

Professor Kop extends his gratitude to War on the Rocks editor Lieutenant Colonel Walter ‘Rick’ Landgraf, PhD, whose precise editorial work helped sharpen the argument and tailor it to the publication’s strategic readership.

The Core Argument: A Bletchley Method for Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration

The essay begins from a straightforward technical premise. Once fault-tolerant quantum computers exist, Shor’s algorithm will efficiently factor large integers and compute discrete logarithms, thereby breaking the public-key cryptosystems—such as RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography—on which secure communication currently relies. In parallel, Grover’s algorithm will provide a quadratic speed-up in brute-force search, effectively halving the security margin of many symmetric-key schemes.

In this setting, the world’s cryptographic infrastructure cannot simply be patched at the margins. It requires a comprehensive, carefully managed transition to new, quantum-resistant algorithms.

Kop proposes that the United States and its allies apply a “Bletchley method” to this problem by tightly linking:

Domestic execution of PQC migration, and
An allied, standards-based certification compact that prevents fragmentation.

Defensively, this means post-quantum cryptography by default and certified interoperability across critical systems. Politically, it means that Washington earns the right to lead abroad by delivering verifiable results at home.

The framework is organised around two distinct but mutually reinforcing tracks:

Track One – “Ultra at Home”: rigorous domestic execution, and
Track Two – “Allied Codebook Abroad”: international architecture designed to avoid a “quantum splinternet.”

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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

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