Quantum Snake Oil Is Drowning Out Real Progress
Quantum ComputingQuantum Security & PQCQuantum Snake Oil
Quantum Snake Oil Is Flooding the News Cycle — and the Industry Is Letting It Happen
Marin Ivezic
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June 18, 2026<br>6 minutes read
Table of Contents
June 17, 2026 — I wanted to catch up with the quantum news to share here, but I couldn’t. I got too frustrated.
My quantum news feed over the past few days was dominated by quantum snake oil. Several separate announcements so detached from physical reality that I initially assumed they were satire, each backed by zero peer review. Trade publications ran them with minimal scrutiny. LinkedIn amplified them. And the legitimate quantum research that actually matters got buried under the noise.
I have written about Q-FUD and quantum snake oil before and I am not going to rehash those arguments here. What I want to do instead is describe what showed up in a few-day window in June 2026, because the concentration tells us something about where this industry is heading. And it’s not good.
I am deliberately not naming the companies involved. They do not deserve additional attention, and the patterns are more useful than the names. If you follow the quantum industry, you will recognize them.
Three Claims, Zero Peer Review
Claim 1: FTQC achieved on rented cloud hardware by a software startup.
A small company with two founders, neither of whom has a physics degree, quantum computing publications, or any documented experience in quantum error correction, issued a press release claiming to have achieved fault-tolerant quantum computing on rented IBM cloud hardware. Their proprietary AI software layer, they said, had eliminated the need for the qubit overhead that every QEC scheme requires. They reported “zero detected logical errors” at what they described as a one-to-one physical-to-logical qubit ratio on a 150-qubit register.
Let me be direct about what this means physically. A distance-5 surface code requires 49 physical qubits per logical qubit: 25 data qubits and 24 measurement qubits arranged in a specific lattice. That ratio is a mathematical consequence of how quantum error-correcting codes work, grounded in the quantum Hamming bound and the Knill-Laflamme conditions. No software layer can optimize it away. Claiming a 1:1 ratio is claiming that proven theorems in quantum information theory do not apply to your company.
Google’s Willow result, published in Nature in December 2024, was celebrated because it demonstrated for the first time that logical error rates decreased with increasing code distance on a superconducting platform. That required a purpose-built 72-qubit processor, a team of over 100 researchers, and more than a decade of engineering. IBM’s own roadmap targets its first fault-tolerant system (Starling) for 2029, using architectures and interconnects that do not yet exist.
The company’s evidence? A self-published report on Zenodo, available in full only to “qualified reviewers” under “confidentiality terms.” The CEO’s prior career was as a technology evangelist for an unrelated AI company. The announcement was timed to a major quantum commercialization conference in London. Three days later, not a single QEC researcher had commented publicly.
Claim 2: A $3 billion SPAC for a quantum company built on an unvalidated algorithm.
A quantum company announced a definitive business combination with a blank-check acquisition vehicle, valuing the company at approximately $3 billion. The company describes itself as operating across five quantum business lines simultaneously: quantum security, quantum AI, quantum communications, quantum sensing, and quantum computing. It was founded in early 2025.
The company’s chairman is an adjunct professor in mechanical engineering at a Canadian university. His publication record is in environmental engineering, air quality dispersion modeling, fluid dynamics, and risk assessment software. Earlier this year, an affiliated institute announced a new factoring algorithm that would, they claimed, reduce the resources needed to break RSA by a factor of one thousand, requiring fewer than 5,000 qubits. Security trade press ran the story. Social media amplified it. The algorithm has not been independently validated, peer-reviewed, or reproduced by any cryptography research group.
I should add that I have personal experience with this company’s claims. In private conversations, their representatives went further than anything in the public announcements, telling me they had already broken RSA-4096, but that the results were too sensitive to share publicly. This is a familiar move in quantum snake oil: the public claim is extraordinary, the private claim is even more extraordinary, and the evidence for both is always just out of reach. If you have broken RSA-4096, you have broken the security infrastructure...