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Executive Order 14412 set December 2030 and December 2031 post-quantum deadlines for federal agencies, and NSA dates bind national security systems. Outside those systems, the measures reviewed here would date a company's duty through a FAR rule not yet proposed.
Buyers already pair control electronics and refrigerators from different suppliers and use open compiler formats. Calibration has a published specification only for pulse jobs. Module links have none. In those two layers, buyers still depend on one vendor.
In measurement-device-independent QKD, an untrusted relay makes every measurement, so the detector attacks demonstrated on commercial systems no longer work. Researchers have still taken full keys through a flawed transmitter. Users also give up key rate.
A quantum computer runs on clocks from nanoseconds to hours. IBM and Xanadu both drew their software layers along those clocks. A buyer still cannot swap one vendor's processor, controller or decoder for another's by recompiling.
Silicon spin qubits now come from 300 mm lines at imec, Intel, and STMicroelectronics. No maker has yet shown a fab supplying enriched silicon, qubits uniform enough to tune automatically at scale, or control electronics within a million-qubit power budget.
McKinsey took its $15.3 billion for China's public quantum funding from CIFAR, which converted a reported ¥100 billion for one national laboratory in 2021. No published Chinese budget confirms it. A congressman has described it as investment.
Researchers have fit Shor's algorithm into 9,739 neutral-atom physical qubits, with elliptic-curve runs that lengthen from 10 days to about 1,000 as the count falls. The authors assumed error rates and clock speeds no machine has shown together.
In PNAS, Oxford's Tim Palmer proposed that quantum computers lose their advantage above about 1,000 perfect qubits. He wrote that his theory and standard quantum mechanics agree on small systems. No experiment has yet tested where they differ.
