Quantum Tech Export Controls Risk Stifling Innovation, Collaboration, Experts Say
The U.S. should be careful not to impose strict export controls on quantum technologies that risk hampering academic research and domestic innovation, quantum tech experts told the Center for Strategic and International Studies April 14. They also said the U.S. should allow for an open academic environment that encourages foreign researchers to enter and stay in the U.S. or risk losing those researchers to other countries, such as China.
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“We have to be careful,” said Zaira Nazario, a quantum theorist at IBM. “It has to be done in a way that, yes, it does protect, but it does not slow the pace of progress of the U.S. quantum computing industry.”
The Commerce Department has been considering proposing export restrictions on narrow slices of quantum computing technologies for at least several years under its emerging and foundational technology control effort. Although quantum technologies may eventually have military uses, researchers have warned Commerce that controls could slow scientific progress and fail to target the most “defense-relevant applications'' (see 2202180013).
Travis Humble, interim director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Quantum Science Center, said some export restrictions may eventually be necessary, but urged Commerce to think carefully before applying them. “It needs to not be reactive. It needs to be based on specific, credible concerns about what that technology will do,” Humble said of potential controls. “We have to be able to anticipate and forecast how it's going to develop over time, and then react to that in terms of the development of the entire structure.”
The Government Accountability Office last year warned that overbroad export controls could restrict collaboration between U.S. researchers and other countries and stifle American quantum technology innovation (see 2110210020). The technology “needs involvement from a wider community to help develop” it, Nazario said, adding that the U.S. should allow for “open environments” that make the technology research “available to a wider set of people, not just a handful of people in a lab or a handful of people with a lot of resources.”
Open collaboration should especially be prioritized in academia, said Andrew Houck, electrical and computer engineering professor at Princeton University. He said the U.S. should make sure it’s attracting and retaining foreign talent to study and research the technology, or risk losing those researchers to foreign competitors. “If we stop people from coming to the U.S., they're not going to stop doing the research,” Houck said. “They're just going to do it for China's research ecosystem, where that talent can be absorbed quite easily.”
Houck also said quantum technology is “quite a long distance and many significant breakthroughs away” from reaching a point where it “actually has immediate national security implications.” Humble agreed that the technology currently poses no “specific threat to security,” but he also said that may quickly change.
“I don't have the solution on the policies that should be put in place to maintain the American economic competitiveness as well as our security,” Humble said. “But I can definitely recognize the tension there.”