My Articles, Opinions and Analyses
Underestimating China: Why Beijing Could Win the Quantum Race
Nine investigations. One conclusion. China's structural advantages in quantum technology make it the most dangerous competitor the West has ever underestimated. Over the past several months, I examined every dimension of China's quantum program — the industrial policy that elevated quantum to the #1 priority in the 15th Five-Year Plan, the unverifiable billions flowing through ...
China’s Quantum Supply Chain: How Export Controls Are Building What They Sought to Prevent
In June 2023, a Zhejiang University graduate named Chen Jie sat for an interview with a Chinese tech columnist. Chen had founded a cryogenics company called CSSC Pengli in Nanjing thirteen years earlier — a subsidiary of China State Shipbuilding Corporation that made cooling systems for MRI machines. Nobody in the West had heard of ...
China’s Quantum Sensing Ecosystem: From Deep-Sea Diamonds to Drone-Mounted Submarine Hunters
In April 2025, a team from the University of Science and Technology of China published what might be the most consequential quantum sensing result of the decade — and almost nobody in the Western security community noticed. They had taken a nitrogen-vacancy center diamond magnetometer, packaged it into a ruggedized housing, and lowered it to ...
OT Security in the Age of AI Exploits: What Anthropic’s Mythos Preview Means for Critical Infrastructure
On April 7, 2026, Anthropic disclosed Claude Mythos Preview, an AI model that autonomously discovers and exploits zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser. As I detailed in my analysis of the announcement, these capabilities represent a structural break in the economics of offensive security. Work that used to require elite teams, ...
China’s Quantum Networking and QKD — World’s Most Ambitious Quantum Communication Program
On September 29, 2017, a video call connected two men separated by 7,600 kilometres. On one end, in Beijing, Bai Chunli, president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. On the other, in Vienna, Anton Zeilinger, the physicist who would later win the 2022 Nobel Prize. The call consumed roughly 560 kilobits of encryption key per ...
China’s Quantum Computing Hardware: The Core Capability the West Keeps Misjudging
The published record suggests China trails the US by about a year. The actual gap may be narrower — or it may already be closed. In December 2025, a team at the University of Science and Technology of China quietly posted a paper to Physical Review Letters demonstrating something only one other laboratory on Earth ...
China’s Quantum Talent Ecosystem: Building a Superpower’s Workforce
In 1996, a 26-year-old physics student from the University of Science and Technology of China arrived in Vienna to begin doctoral work under Anton Zeilinger, one of the world's leading quantum experimentalists. Five years later, he went home. That decision — one young physicist choosing to return to a country that had no quantum information ...
China’s Hefei National Laboratory: The Nerve Center of a Quantum Superpower
On April 26, 2016, Xi Jinping walked into USTC's Advanced Technology Research Institute in Hefei and listened to a physicist named Pan Jianwei describe the future of quantum information science. What Xi said next — "Very promising, very important… the country will definitely support this" — set in motion the largest single investment in quantum ...
The $15.3 Billion Number That Everyone Cites and Nobody Can Verify
In October 2023, I was on a call with a European defense ministry official who wanted to discuss quantum threats. Within the first five minutes, he cited it. "China has invested $15.3 billion in quantum technology - nearly double the EU and four times the United States." He said it with the confidence of someone ...
China’s 15th Five-Year Plan Makes Quantum an Industrial Imperative — Not Just a Research Priority
When China's National People's Congress approved the 15th Five-Year Plan on March 12, 2026, it completed a journey that had been building for over a decade. Quantum technology, once buried deep in academic research budgets, emerged at the top of Beijing's list of seven "future industries" designated as new engines of national economic growth. Above ...
The CRQC Scorecard: How Close Is Each Quantum Modality to Breaking Your Encryption?
Yesterday, two papers landed that set social media on fire. Google Quantum AI published a landmark resource estimate showing that fewer than 500,000 superconducting qubits could break Bitcoin's elliptic curve cryptography in under nine minutes. Hours later, a team from Oratomic, Caltech, and UC Berkeley — including some of the most credible names in fault-tolerant ...
The Leapfrog Doctrine: How China Systematically Conquered Every Technology It Targeted
Almost fifteen years ago, I stood on the mezzanine floor of a manufacturing facility in Dongguan, staring into the dark. Literally. Below me, a sprawling production line hummed with the rhythmic, pneumatic hiss of assembly arms and the whine of servos. There were no overhead lights. There were no workers on the line. There was ...
The Dark Horse: How Silicon Quietly Assembled Every Building Block for Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing
The quantum computing modality race has had a clear narrative for most of the past decade. Superconducting qubits were the frontrunners — Google's quantum supremacy demonstration in 2019, IBM's steadily growing processor roadmap, the first below-threshold surface code results in 2024. Trapped ions were the precision contenders — the highest individual gate fidelities of any ...
Three Bets on Silicon: Donor Qubits, Quantum Dots, and the Foundry Path Compared
When people say "silicon quantum computing," they often speak as if it is one thing. It is not. It is at least three distinct approaches, built on the same material but employing different physics, different fabrication methods, and different strategies for reaching fault-tolerant scale. Understanding these differences — and the tradeoffs each makes — is ...
Science Confirms What Large Corporate Survivors Already Knew – Organizational Bullshit Makes You Worse at Your Job
Regular readers will know that organizational bullshit is a topic I've been fascinated by - and personally scarred by - for years. I wrote about it at length back in 2022, drawing on the foundational academic work by Frankfurt, Spicer, McCarthy, and others, and making the case that we need to systematically free organizations from ...
Inside Quantum Computing’s Modular Revolution – Discussion with QuantWare’s CEO Matt Rijlaarsdam
Quantum computing is entering a new phase where scaling up isn’t just about qubit counts - it’s about how those qubits are built and integrated. A recent discussion with QuantWare’s CEO, Matt Rijlaarsdam, shed light on “quantum open architecture” (QOA) approach that could transform the industry. By focusing on modular design and specialization (instead of ...
China’s Quantum OS Play: Origin Pilot and the Battle for the Integration Layer
China's Origin Pilot isn't just another quantum SDK — it's a top-down systems integration layer that challenges the West's bottom-up approach to quantum open architecture ...
Origin Quantum Computing Technology Co.
Origin Quantum Computing Technology Co. (本源量子计算科技) is China's first and most prominent quantum computing startup, building a vertically integrated superconducting quantum computing platform that spans from chip fabrication through operating system to cloud delivery. Headquartered in Hefei, Anhui Province - the heart of China's "Quantum Avenue" - the company occupies a unique position in the ...
No One Has Secretly Broken RSA-2048 or RSA-4096 — Here’s the Science
If someone tells you RSA-2048 or even RSA-4096 has been secretly cracked, they are either lying to you or have been lied to. There is no third option that is consistent with physics, engineering, the observable behavior of governments and intelligence agencies, the visible state of the global research community, the industrial supply chain for ...
Quantum Sovereignty & Geopolitics
Quantum technologies are leaving the lab and entering the machinery of national power — and "quantum sovereignty" is becoming a blunt strategic question: who can build, operate, trust, and control quantum capabilities under geopolitical stress, without being cut off? This article is the roadmap for the Quantum Sovereignty & Geopolitics series, which treats sovereignty as ...
Bitcoin’s Quantum Timeline Is Not RSA’s Quantum Timeline
Most quantum-risk-to-Bitcoin analyses rehash RSA-2048 timelines. They're missing the point. Bitcoin doesn't use RSA. It uses 256-bit ECC - and Shor's algorithm will break that first. Scan the quantum computing coverage of Bitcoin and you will find a remarkable pattern. Article after article cites the same RSA-2048 qubit estimates - 20 million physical qubits (Gidney-Ekerå ...
Q-FUD: The Quantum Panic Industry
Cybersecurity has always had a FUD problem. “FUD” (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) is the oldest trick in enterprise security marketing: paint a worst-case scenario, imply you’re already compromised, sprinkle in enough jargon to make the buyer feel outgunned, and then offer the “only” solution - conveniently available this quarter. Q‑FUD is that same playbook, just ...
Quantum Low-Density Parity-Check (qLDPC) Codes
Quantum Low-Density Parity-Check (qLDPC) codes are an emerging class of quantum error-correcting codes that promise to significantly reduce the overhead required for fault-tolerant quantum computing. Much like their classical LDPC counterparts, qLDPC codes are defined by sparse parity-check constraints: each check (stabilizer) acts on only a small number of qubits, and each qubit participates in ...
Pinnacle Architecture: 100,000 Qubits to Break RSA-2048, but at What Cost?
Iceberg Quantum's Pinnacle Architecture paper claims RSA-2048 can be factored with fewer than 100,000 physical qubits - a genuine 10× reduction over the previous state of the art - by replacing surface codes with quantum LDPC codes. The result is credible but shifts difficulty from qubit count to equally daunting engineering challenges: non-local connectivity, fast ...
