In March 2024, Australia’s National Anti-Scam Centre warned consumers about fake news articles and deepfake videos that promoted scam investment trading platforms. “Reports to Scamwatch indicate the most prolific online investment trading platform scam appears under the brand ‘Quantum AI’,” the center wrote. Such videos and articles “often claim that the online trading platform uses artificial intelligence or other emerging technologies such as quantum computing to generate high returns for investors, but it is not true,” said Catriona Lowe, deputy chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).
In October 2025, Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority and Denmark’s Financial Supervisory Authority warned that the firm behind a Quantum AI website lacked their authorization. Quantum AI is the far end of quantum washing, the practice of attaching the word “quantum” to products or companies that use no quantum technology, or of overstating what quantum technology contributes.
Quantum washing plausibly raises the cost of proof for every company in the field, though no one has measured that cost. Regulators in at least five countries have already acted against its worst cases or warned the public about them. Against generic claims about real quantum technology, they can act under the same rules only case by case, when they find a specific claim misleading. Companies with real results now face the same independent tests and payment milestones as everyone else.
Where regulators have acted
In February 2013, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled against ads by Harmony United that asked how “Quantum Physics” could increase readers’ health and performance. Harmony said its products ensured that “energy and information were sufficiently ordered” for the body and mind to use, and it cited two articles that it said showed the products could increase health and performance. The ASA noted that the articles “did not provide full clinical trials” and found that the claims “had not been substantiated and therefore breached the Code.”
In December 2021, the Dutch Authority for Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection (ANVS) listed a “Quantum Pendant” among consumer products that researchers at RIVM, the Dutch public-health institute, found to emit ionizing radiation. The authority said Dutch law prohibits the sale of those products and told known Dutch vendors to stop selling them.
In October 2023, a federal court in New York entered a settlement order in the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) case over a badge called the “1 Virus Buster Invisible Mask.” The FTC alleged that the badge’s sellers falsely claimed it protected users from COVID-19 and that it “uses quantum theory technology.” The three settling defendants, including K W Technology Inc., agreed to pay $150,000 and neither admitted nor denied the FTC’s allegations.
The regulators in these cases applied rules already in force on advertising substantiation, radiation safety, deceptive health claims, and investment licensing.
Greenwashing and AI washing
Regulators handled greenwashing, the overstatement of environmental credentials, with general rules for decades before the EU wrote a binding ban on generic claims. The FTC first issued its Green Guides in 1992 and last revised them in 2012. The guides do not bind the agency or the public, the FTC wrote, but it “can take action under the FTC Act” against claims inconsistent with them.
In October 2022, the ASA ruled that two HSBC posters promoting its net-zero financing and tree planting “omitted material information and were therefore misleading.” HSBC had argued that the posters described specific, measurable initiatives.
In September 2023, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) found that DWS Investment Management Americas, a Deutsche Bank subsidiary, had marketed itself as “a leader in ESG” while failing to carry out parts of its own policy for weighing environmental, social, and governance factors. DWS paid a $19 million penalty without admitting or denying the findings.
The EU adopted its binding ban on generic environmental claims in 2024. Under Directive 2024/825, applicable from September 27, 2026, a trader may not make “a generic environmental claim” without showing “recognised excellent environmental performance relevant to the claim.”
In March 2023, the European Commission proposed requiring verification of green claims before use. It said in June 2025 that it intended to withdraw the proposal. On November 4, 2026, the Commission listed the proposal, still formally pending, for withdrawal within six months in an annex to its 2027 work program. If regulators treat quantum claims as they have treated green claims, they will judge generic quantum labels one case at a time for years, with no rule that requires proof before a claim is made.
The SEC moved from its March 2024 AI-washing cases to a unit for emerging-technology fraud in 11 months. In March 2024, it settled charges against two investment advisers, Delphia and Global Predictions, over claims that they used AI in ways they did not. The firms paid $400,000 in combined penalties without admitting or denying the findings. “Such AI washing hurts investors,” said Gary Gensler, then the SEC’s chair.
In January 2025, the SEC found that Presto Automation, a restaurant-technology company, had not disclosed that another company’s AI technology powered every Presto Voice drive-through unit it deployed commercially from November 2021 to September 2022. Presto consented to a cease-and-desist order without admitting or denying the findings. The SEC brought these cases under securities laws passed between 1933 and 1940.
In February 2025, the SEC created a Cyber and Emerging Technologies Unit of about 30 fraud specialists and attorneys. The first priority on its published list is “fraud committed using emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.” Quantum technology appears nowhere on that list.
Claims about real quantum technology
The harder cases involve real quantum technology described as more than it is. A quantum random number generator (QRNG) uses quantum effects to produce the random numbers from which encryption keys are made. A product that includes one can still encrypt data entirely with classical algorithms. Classical random number generators “have met these needs for many years, and continue to do so,” Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) wrote in an August 2025 paper on quantum networking.
Vendors of post-quantum cryptography (PQC), the family of classical algorithms designed to resist attacks by quantum computers, can present it as quantum technology. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published its first three PQC standards in August 2024. They cover ML-KEM, previously called CRYSTALS-Kyber, for agreeing on a secret key. They also cover two signature schemes, ML-DSA and SLH-DSA, known before standardization as CRYSTALS-Dilithium and SPHINCS+.
Any vendor may implement them. A vendor that presents the algorithms themselves as its own quantum technology is selling a public standard under a brand name, whatever original engineering it adds around them.
Buyers can check such claims against NIST’s own records. By September 21, 2026, NIST had validated at least seven cryptographic modules that support its post-quantum algorithms, as Quantum Observer found. A vendor whose module has passed that testing can give a buyer the certificate number.
Academic researchers face a version of the same labeling problem. In a peer-reviewed systematic review of quantum bioinformatics studies, published in Frontiers in High Performance Computing in September 2026, researchers at two Italian universities, Sapienza in Rome and Tuscia in Viterbo, found that 36 of 53 peer-reviewed quantum bioinformatics studies never ran on a quantum computer. They asked authors to state clearly whether results came from quantum hardware, circuit simulations, or quantum-inspired heuristics.
Regulators can use existing rules against these practices only case by case. Even when the FTC acts against an environmental claim that conflicts with its Green Guides, it “must prove that the challenged act or practice is unfair or deceptive,” the commission wrote in the guides. Quantum claims have no such guides. The EU’s 2024 ban covers environmental claims only.
The cost of proof
Government funders now attach independent testing and milestones to their money. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) designed its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative to “rigorously verify and validate whether any quantum computing approach can achieve utility-scale operation.” Joe Altepeter, then the program’s manager, said in April 2025 that DARPA would use federal and state test facilities “to separate hype from reality in quantum computing.” In October 2026, DARPA moved four more companies into the program’s final stage, in which a government team tests whether each company’s proposed machine can be built as designed.
The Energy Department (DOE) plans to pay $200 million of the $215 million in its Quantum Genesis Q Competition only to companies that reach its first-generation goal, which it defines as at least 100 logical qubits, error-protected units each built from many physical qubits. DOE calls the targets in its table illustrative and will identify “equivalent technical metrics” for architectures not measured in logical qubits. A verification team designated by DOE will check the results, with a final evaluation expected in September 2028.
The Commerce Department holds back about half of each $100 million CHIPS award to D-Wave, Rigetti, and Quantinuum until the company meets project milestones, as Quantum Observer reported on the CHIPS award terms.
Australian regulators told retail investors in March 2024 that scam promotions falsely claimed to use quantum computing. A firm that offers real quantum methods to investors now pitches to an audience that regulators have warned about the same words.
Capital and conditions
McKinsey’s investment figures are the strongest evidence against this argument. The firm estimated in April 2026 that investment in quantum technology start-ups “reached $12.6 billion in 2025, 6.3 times higher than in 2024.” On those numbers, investors have kept funding the field despite quantum washing. McKinsey counted the amount of that investment, not the testing and milestones attached to government money.
A second objection is that regulators will police quantum claims with the rules they already have. Consumer, safety, and financial regulators did act on each of the worst cases described here, all of which involved products sold to the public or to retail investors.
When the SEC created its new unit, Mark Uyeda, then its acting chairman, said it would let the agency “deploy enforcement resources judiciously.” The SEC has not named quantum claims among the unit’s priorities. Its examiners listed quantum computing for fiscal 2027 only as an emerging trend in the market systems covered by Regulation SCI. Until the SEC brings a case, investors and funders check listed companies’ quantum claims themselves.
Signals to watch
A regulator that applied general antifraud law to a listed company’s quantum claims, as the SEC did with Presto’s AI claims, would support the argument. So would a court that treated a generic label such as “quantum-safe” as a claim needing evidence.
No one has yet tracked what buyers spend on procurement diligence, testing, and financing terms over time, or asked them which changes followed misleading claims. A court ruling that quantum capability claims are sales talk that no reasonable buyer relies on would weaken the legal half of the argument. If more companies use generic labels without evidence, regulators already have a model in the EU’s 2024 ban on generic environmental claims.
Until one of those developments occurs, buyers have a working test. A company that makes a quantum claim can say which technology it means, whether a quantum processor, quantum key distribution over optical links, a QRNG, or a NIST post-quantum algorithm. It can also point to a paper, a validation certificate, or an independent test.
