Through two presidential directives, the Biden administration announced a new policy framework to maintain its competitive advantage in quantum technology while mitigating the cyber risk.
Quantum computing, for the most part of it, is still in the early days of commercialization, but we are by no means stuck there. In fact, governments and private sector entities around the world have been increasingly adopting national quantum programs and decade-long quantum strategies to keep up with the race. None have however come close to the US and China which are both leaders in the quantum technology field.
To be fair, both the US and China have claimed to have reached “quantum supremacy”, but it is the latter that has notched several notable advancements in recent years as opposed to the former. For an instance, in 2019, Google reported that its 53-qubit Sycamore processor had completed in 3.3 minutes a task that would have taken a traditional supercomputer at least 2.5 days.
Two years later, in October 2021, China’s 66-qubit Zuchongzhi 2 quantum processor reportedly completed the same task one million times faster. Even Pentagon’s chief software officer Nicolas Chaillan suggested that the US has “no competing fighting chance against China” in the race to develop dual-use technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, and cyber capabilities.
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