CUSP Quantum Primacy Report Urges National Quantum Foundry

The Commission on U.S. Quantum Primacy (CUSP), whose members include U.S. senators and industry and research figures from IBM, Google and elsewhere, released its first preliminary report, “Defining the American Quantum Era,” on November 10 (14:45 UTC).

The commission argued that America’s research-strong quantum capabilities must be turned into an industrial system that can actually build, use and scale the technology, and proposed measures including a national quantum foundry access program and joint benchmarking led by NIST.

The commission was convened by the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), a U.S. think tank. Its co-chairs are Republican Sen. Todd Young (Indiana), Democratic Sen. Ben Ray Luján (New Mexico) and SCSP President Ylli Bajraktari. Commissioners come from IBM, Google Quantum AI, IonQ, SandboxAQ, IQT, Playground Global, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories, Quantum Corridor and the University of Maryland, among others. Because senators from both parties put their names to it, the report could serve as a blueprint for quantum legislation in the next Congress.

The report defines “quantum primacy” as the sustained ability to discover, develop, deploy and scale quantum capabilities that strengthen national security, innovation and economic competitiveness. “Leadership in quantum will not be determined by who publishes the most papers or who reaches a single milestone first,” Bajraktari said.

The recommendations are organized into four stages. Under the first, “Discover,” the commission called for more long-term support for institutions, universities and national laboratories, a dedicated research track to find new quantum algorithms and applications, and support for AI-enabled scientific tools.

Under the second, “Develop,” it proposed a national program to advance hardware and software together. The model is the Exascale Computing Project, a U.S. Department of Energy effort that developed software for ultra-high-performance supercomputers in parallel with the hardware. The commission also included a public-private benchmarking and interoperability effort led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Under the third, “Deploy,” it urged expanding use cases ready for real missions and turning demonstration results into reusable procurement experience and hybrid quantum-classical workflows. It also recommended accelerating the transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC). PQC is a next-generation form of encryption based on mathematical problems that are hard to solve even for quantum computers, and the report named critical infrastructure and state and local governments as targets for transition support.

The fourth stage, “Scale,” comes closest to industrial policy. The commission called for securing domestic and trusted-ally supply chains, establishing a National Quantum Foundry Access Program through which researchers and companies share manufacturing facilities, and building a workforce at every level from technicians to PhDs. It also proposed an “allied quantum market” in which allies align testing and procurement standards and share technology under stable, risk-based export controls.

The report found that the technologies differ in maturity. It classified quantum sensing as the first to see use, in navigation, defense, medicine and science; quantum computing as approaching usefulness in chemistry, materials and drug discovery while error correction, scale and real-world applications remain challenges; and quantum networking as a longer-term challenge, though early networks exist.

The limitations are clear. The introduction page and announcement contain no figures at all, such as budget size, workforce targets or performance metrics. The commission said it will present a concrete implementation strategy, policy recommendations and infrastructure needs in its final report in spring 2027.

The preliminary report shows the center of gravity in U.S. quantum policy shifting from “research support” to “manufacturing, supply chains and allied markets.” Its framing of competition with China as a question of industrial capacity and trusted supply chains reflects the same trend. But the report offers only a direction, and the scale of support is left blank. Congress began its lame-duck session on November 9 and must pass a budget by December 11, so whether these recommendations translate into actual funding and legislation is likely to be decided in the next Congress.