A speaker at the TechNet Indo-Pacific conference in Hawaii made the bold claim that “China is about a decade ahead of us on quantum” during a panel discussing the use of artificial intelligence for warfighting. 

TechNet Indo-Pacific is a military conference held each year dedicated to discussions on defense and wartime preparedness. Its particular area of focus is the geographical area between Africa’s eastern coast and the US’s western coast. 

The panel, “AI/ML as a Warfighting Advantage” took place on Oct. 22 and featured several speakers from the tech industry including the executive who issued the warning, Theresa Melvin, chief technology officer at AI firm Aerospike. 

According to Melvin, China has achieved a purported “decade ahead” advantage in quantum “specifically because they never fought a war on terror.” However, there appears to be little scientific or economic evidence to support these assertions. 

War on terror

Melvin’s remarks concerning the war on terror seemingly stem from the idea that China has outspent the US on quantum computing research. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), China has spent over $15 billion in public funding on quantum research, approximately five times more than the US. 

There’s no scientific measure by which the amount of money spent or the number of research articles published can be directly correlated to measurable progress. Furthermore, those figures don’t account for private sector spending on quantum technologies, an area the US leads in. 

Related: Quantum computer ‘threat’ to crypto is exaggerated — for now

Even factoring in the cost of the US war on terror, which high-end estimates place at approximately $8 trillion, the US GDP surpasses China by more than $10 trillion annually according to data from the World Bank Group. 

This indicates that a direct comparison of progress between the two nations based on government spending is in no way indicative of either’s capabilities in the quantum sector. 

Quantum advantage

China’s quantum computing sector recently made headlines when the South China Morning Post reported on Oct. 13 that scientists at Shanghai University had used a Canadian-built quantum device to crack “military grade” encryption.

This report was quickly debunked and, per translations of the research paper generated by both Google and Microsoft services independently, the scientists appear to have made no such claims in their research.

Related: China has not cracked encryption, at least not yet — Mental Outlaw

The aforementioned ITIF report gives a more nuanced and comprehensive overview of what China’s quantum technologies sector actually looks like and how it compares to the US. 

“China leads in quantum communications, lags behind in computing (where the United States excels), and matches the United States in sensing,” reads the report, adding that “the United States dominates high-impact areas.”

The high-impact areas the US “dominates” are those most closely related to security and defense: quantum computing and quantum encryption. Standards and encryption algorithms for the post-quantum era have already been developed in the US.

While it’s true that China’s research on quantum communications is widely considered world-class, there’s little evidence to support that it’s as competitive in the field of quantum computing or encryption/decryption. 

Publicly available research and roadmaps indicate that US-based private sector companies such as Google, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, and others are ahead of China in those specific areas as well as related fields such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

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