Policy Brief No. 222 — February 2026
Global Quantum Governance: From Principles to Practice Mauritz Kop and Tracey Forrest
Key Points → Quantum is moving from theory to deployment; near-term milestones — post-quantum cryptography (PQC) migration and quantum networking — create a governance tipping point after which societal harms may be difficult to remediate. → National strategies, including the proposed EU Quantum Act, are necessary but insufficient: quantum’s global reach, dual-use implications and asymmetric capabilities require an international, standards-first framework that enables security-sufficient openness, overseen by an International Quantum Agency. → Operationalizing foundational principles for responsible quantum innovation, the policy brief uses high-stakes use cases — quantum-enhanced diagnostics and clocks, quantum networks and simulation — as legal and regulatory stress tests for oversight. → The authors then examine the nexus of intellectual property (IP), national security, supply chains, geoeconomic and geostrategic competition, outlining a coordinated path forward.
Introduction: The Governance Imperative — From National Acts to a Global Accord The journey toward responsible quantum governance has begun with significant, albeit fragmented, foundational steps. The European Union’s proposed Quantum Act signals a crucial shift by a major techno-economic bloc to combine industrial policy with risk-based regulation, seeking to embed democratic values into the technology’s architecture.1 This initiative, however, represents just one piece of a much larger geopolitical puzzle. The global scientific community has echoed this need for proactive governance, and there are calls for a “standards-first” approach that prioritizes the early development of interoperable globally harmonized technical standards for terminology, benchmarking and safety to foster innovation and forestall regulatory fragmentation (Aboy et al. 2025). Utilizing such soft-law governance tools acts as a
1
See www.european-quantum-act.com/.