Inside the New Spy Race: How the US, China, Russia, Israel and Italy Are Gearing Up for Agentic AI and Quantum Computing Threats
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Quantum Horizon<br>Il portale italiano sul computer quantistico e le tecnologie emergenti
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Inside the New Spy Race: How the US, China, Russia, Israel and Italy Are Gearing Up for Agentic AI and Quantum Computing Threats
di<br>Remo Pulcini
·<br>Agosto 8, 2026
By Remo Pulcini — Quantum Horizon Italia
Nuclear warheads, submarines, and arms-control treaties defined intelligence rivalry for eight decades. In 2026, two converging technologies agentic artificial intelligence and quantum computing are rewriting the rules of espionage and counter-espionage at a pace no international framework has managed to keep up with. This is no longer speculative futurism: it is the explicit lens through which the US intelligence community, Chinese strategic planners, Russian security services, Israeli signals intelligence, and Italy’s own Servizi are now rebuilding doctrine, budgets, and operational priorities.
Two threats, one collision course
The danger runs along two parallel tracks that are increasingly merging into one. The first is agentic AI systems that plan, act, and adapt with minimal human supervision which by 2026 has become a genuine force multiplier for attackers and defenders alike. Security researchers now describe the "rogue agent" scenario, in which an autonomous system executes unauthorized actions across interconnected workflows, as the defining new nightmare for enterprise and government security teams. Tellingly, the concept of a "kill switch" is shifting away from a physical power cord toward the ability to instantly revoke an agent’s digital identity as part of lifecycle governance.
The second track is the so-called "Q-Day" the moment a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) becomes capable of breaking today’s standard asymmetric encryption schemes: RSA, ECC, Diffie-Hellman. Most credible estimates place that threshold somewhere in the 2028–2030 window, with early experimental demonstrations expected as soon as 2026–2027. But the practical threat doesn’t wait for that date. It is already unfolding through "harvest now, decrypt later" the strategy by which state actors and organized cybercrime groups are hoovering up encrypted traffic today, betting they’ll be able to decrypt it retroactively once quantum capability catches up. Trade secrets, diplomatic cables, intelligence dossiers: anything that needs to stay confidential for more than a decade is, in effect, already compromised.
United States: encryption as critical national infrastructure
Washington has institutionalized its response more thoroughly than any other power. The foundation remains National Security Memorandum-10, signed by the Biden administration in May 2022, which set the goal of mitigating quantum risk "to the extent feasible by 2035" and mandated an annual inventory of vulnerable systems from every federal agency. The Trump administration has kept that framework intact its June 2025 executive order explicitly cites NSM-10 as the foundational document and in June 2026 the White House issued Memorandum M-26-15, "Securing the Nation Against Advanced Cryptanalytically Relevant Quantum Computers," further accelerating post-quantum migration across federal networks.
The technical roadmap is now locked in. NIST finalized three post-quantum standards in August 2024 FIPS 203 (ML-KEM), FIPS 204 (ML-DSA), and FIPS 205 (SLH-DSA) — and added HQC as a fifth encryption algorithm in March 2025. The National Security Agency mandates ML-KEM-1024 and ML-DSA-87 for national security systems, and all new defense acquisitions must be quantum-resistant starting in 2027 a requirement that cascades through the entire defense supply chain, from prime contractors down to individual software vendors.
On the intelligence side proper, the 2026 Annual Threat Assessment the document distilling collective judgments from the CIA, NSA, FBI and the rest of the sixteen-agency community treats AI and quantum computing not as future technologies but as structural forces already reshaping global competition. That’s a genuine doctrinal shift: technological disruption is now being weighed with the same analytical priority historically reserved for nuclear proliferation or transnational terrorism.
China: self-reliance doctrine and a parallel cryptographic track
Beijing is playing a different game, built on tight integration between the state, academic research, and national industrial champions. China’s new Five-Year Plan (2026–2030), unveiled by the Communist Party’s Central Committee, places quantum computing alongside AI among the "new quality productive forces" meant to drive economic growth and scientific leadership the document references AI more than fifty times and introduces a sweeping "AI+ action plan" for cross-sector integration.
The move with the biggest ripple effect for...