The draft leans heavily on supporting the industry, ideally at the EU level, to avoid national champions struggling to scale because of a lack of funding. It also mandates governments to procure quantum technology from EU-based companies, or from countries that have a strategic partnership with the EU on the technology.
The EU agrees quantum legislation should be fundamentally different than for AI, a senior Commission official told POLITICO: “It’s not about regulation. There’s nothing to regulate.”
‘Nothing to regulate’
The EU was quick to regulate AI through its AI Act, even before the 2022 release of ChatGPT brought generative AI into the technology mainstream. The Commission tabled a first proposal in April 2021, and talks closed in 2024.
“AI is about usage of technology, it’s a solution, whereas quantum is an infrastructure. It’s a resource, it’s hardware, it’s computing power,” Peronnin said. “You don’t regulate computing power, you regulate what you do with that compute power.”
Goetz described Europe’s AI strategy as “very regulatory,” compared with other approaches. “The U.S. continued to invest money in it, and now we’re in a situation where all of the big AI labs are in the U.S., the chips come from the U.S.”
The draft quantum law closely mirrors the bloc’s chipmaking plan, the Chips Act 2.0, and its data center plans, the Cloud and AI Development Act — both of which aim to reduce Europe’s dependency on U.S. technology and boost capabilities instead of regulating technology.