The OECD’s December 2025 overview of national quantum strategies arrives at a significant moment in the governance of quantum technologies. As of late 2025, governments worldwide have committed an estimated USD 55.7 billion to quantum science and technology since 2013, with at least 18 OECD member countries plus the European Union having formally adopted dedicated strategies.[1] This proliferation reflects a growing consensus that quantum technologies are not merely academic pursuits but determinants of technological leadership, economic competitiveness, and national security. The United States has expanded its National Quantum Initiative through reauthorization extending funding to 2034 and establishing new NIST quantum centers.[2] The European Union is preparing a Quantum Act for adoption in 2026 to unify fragmented member-state efforts.[3] China has elevated quantum information to a core “frontier technology” in its 14th Five-Year Plan, signaling a shift from experimentation to industrial deployment and strategic autonomy.[4]
Against this backdrop, the OECD report performs a vital diagnostic role. It maps policy instruments used to build quantum ecosystems, compares governance architectures, and highlights the tension between promoting innovation and managing security and geopolitical risks.[5] For policymakers and lawyers, the report provides a reference framework for understanding how national strategies translate into institutions, funding mechanisms and regulatory interfaces with existing legal regimes.
Economic Imperatives and Dual-Purpose Governance
The OECD identifies that national quantum strategies are driven by dual imperatives. The economic case emphasizes potential productivity gains across healthcare, materials science, energy, finance, logistics and communications. Drug discovery through quantum simulation, quantum sensors for imaging, and quantum optimization for logistics and portfolio management are near-to-medium term applications. Governments frame quantum investment as foundational to future competitiveness.[6]
This economic framing coexists with a strong security rationale. Large-scale quantum computers threaten existing encryption that protects financial systems, defense communications and critical infrastructure. The “harvest-now-decrypt-later” scenario has accelerated post-quantum cryptography (PQC). NIST has finalized three core PQC standards (FIPS 203, 204, 205) and is advancing others, with adoption timelines embedded in national cybersecurity strategies.[7] Canada’s National Quantum Strategy includes quantum-secure communications, while the EU’s EuroQCI program is building quantum-safe networks.[8] Beyond cryptography, quantum sensing raises privacy and surveillance concerns, and dual-use applications in cryptanalysis and military systems drive states to build domestic capacity as strategic protection.
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this dual-track approach by enabling large-scale public investment in long-term technologies. The EU’s NextGenerationEU recovery plan, exceeding EUR 800 billion, allowed member states to embed quantum strategies in recovery funding.[9] Germany invested EUR 2 billion in quantum, Austria EUR 107 million, and several others followed. This has created governance challenges: quantum has been grafted onto recovery-funded programs whose legal frameworks were designed for conventional technologies, raising questions for state-aid law, procurement oversight and long-term sustainability.
Governance Structures and Institutional Design
The OECD identifies three broad governance models. In the United States, Japan and France, quantum policy is coordinated at the executive level, through bodies like the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Japan’s Cabinet Office and France’s Prime Minister’s office.[10] This signals political priority and enables alignment between civilian research and national security. The US created a National Quantum Coordination Office, while Japan integrated quantum into its “Moonshot R&D” program.
A second model places specialized quantum offices within science or innovation ministries. The UK’s Office for Quantum within the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology coordinates policy alongside the National Quantum Computing Centre. Singapore’s National Quantum Office similarly aligns research with industrial goals. This provides institutional focus without the political fragility of executive-level arrangements.
A third model, used by Canada, Australia, Korea and several EU states, assigns responsibility to science ministries supported by advisory bodies and interministerial committees. This allows regional participation but risks coordination gaps where no single entity integrates research, security and industrial policy.
The OECD suggests that quantum governance benefits from a single, clearly designated coordination locus. Weak coordination increases risks of duplicated funding, conflicting export controls and inconsistent participation in international standards. Legally, governance design determines who can issue binding guidance on PQC adoption, define “strategic quantum capabilities” for investment screening, or represent the state in standard-setting bodies.
The Emerging Policy Mix and Regulatory Interfaces
The OECD identifies five main policy instruments: institutional funding for public research, project-based grants for public research, business R&D grants, public procurement and equity financing.[11] Each intersects with different legal regimes.
Institutional funding builds long-term quantum research centers, testbeds and hybrid quantum–supercomputing infrastructure. This raises issues of intellectual property in public–private partnerships, data-sharing rules and security requirements in international collaborations. Project-based public research grants involve competitive consortia and must address export controls, research security and cross-border data rules, especially under EU data protection law.
Business R&D grants intersect with competition and state-aid law. Selection criteria, grant conditions and market impacts require legal scrutiny. The EU’s proposed Quantum Act seeks to expand industrial support while remaining compatible with state-aid rules.
Public procurement for quantum systems is strategically crucial. Programs like France’s PROQCIMA and Canada’s quantum-encryption satellites link procurement to strategic autonomy and may rely on national-security exemptions from open-tender rules. However, there is pressure to avoid proprietary “walled gardens” that fragment markets. The EU emphasizes open standards and vendor-neutral interfaces in its emerging framework.
Equity financing in quantum start-ups reduces early-stage risk but creates governance and conflict-of-interest issues and triggers foreign-investment screening. Complexity grows when multiple public authorities co-invest in the same firm, creating overlapping ownership and potentially conflicting priorities.
International Dynamics and Fragmentation Risks
The OECD notes that quantum research was historically highly internationalized, but collaboration has plateaued and declined since 2019.[12] US–EU co-authorship has fallen by about 15 percent. This reflects three developments. First, quantum has become strategically central in major powers’ technology roadmaps, especially in China’s 14th Five-Year Plan. Second, export controls on quantum systems and components have expanded across the US, EU, UK, Japan, Korea, Australia and Canada. Third, fragmented national standards risk creating a “balkanized” quantum landscape where systems cannot interoperate.
The OECD warns against overly broad export controls that lack transparent justification and burden researchers and firms. Industry responses to the EU’s Quantum Act consultation call for streamlined export licensing and better coordination between EU and national authorities. For lawyers, the tension is acute: controls must be predictable enough for compliance but robust enough for security.
Standardization is progressing through NIST’s PQC process, IEEE and ISO/IEC committees on quantum information systems, ITU standards for quantum key distribution and efforts to harmonize benchmarking. The familiar dilemma applies: acting too early risks locking in suboptimal technologies and favoring early movers; acting too late risks fragmentation. The OECD argues for coordinated multilateral standard-setting rather than unilateral national standards.
Implications for Policymakers and Legal Practitioners
Several normative lessons emerge. Governments should create clear governance mandates, designating a single body with statutory responsibility to coordinate quantum policy across research, industry, security and international engagement. Ambiguity leads to incoherent export controls, procurement and standards participation. Quantum strategies should embed mission-oriented design in formal instruments—laws, strategies or government decisions—so that courts and audit bodies can assess necessity and proportionality.
Governments must anticipate spill-overs into existing legal fields. Data protection law must address how quantum sensing and timing affect privacy and surveillance risks. Cybersecurity law must specify PQC adoption timelines and define the legal status of legacy encryption as “harvest-now-decrypt-later” risks grow. Export control and investment screening regimes need quantum-specific lists and thresholds that are transparent, justified and updated, ideally coordinated internationally.
Procurement and equity financing require clear guardrails: transparent vendor selection, openness and standards clauses in contracts, and alignment with competition and state-aid rules. Policymakers should favor flexible indicators and expert review over rigid numerical targets in legislation. Fixing specific qubit counts or workforce numbers in law risks rapid obsolescence and loss of policy flexibility.
Finally, export controls and foreign-investment screening should focus on clearly defined high-risk cases, remain predictable and proportionate, and be harmonized across like-minded states. Fragmented regimes reduce effectiveness while imposing high compliance costs.
Conclusion
The OECD’s overview of national quantum strategies offers a valuable diagnostic baseline for governments and legal practitioners. It shows that coherent quantum governance requires deliberate institutional design, a balanced policy mix and explicit attention to how promotion, protection and international positioning interact. The most important legal challenges will not be the creation of a new field of “quantum law” but the adaptation of existing regimes—research governance, privacy, cybersecurity, export control, procurement and competition—to technologies whose timelines and risks remain uncertain. States revising quantum strategies should use the OECD framework as a checklist, translating comparative insights into concrete mandates, legally robust tools and international commitments that can withstand political change and technological surprise. The window for building coherent, values-based quantum governance is narrow, and the OECD report clarifies both what is at stake and what choices remain open.
[1] OECD, An overview of national strategies and policies for quantum technologies (Dec 8, 2025), Executive Summary and data on strategies and funding. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/an-overview-of-national-strategies-and-policies-for-quantum-technologies_5e55e7ab-en/full-report/component-3.html
[2] US Congress, National Quantum Initiative Reauthorization Act (H.R.6213) https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/6213
[3] Drafting and discussion of an EU Quantum Act are widely reported in policy analysis (e.g., Towards a European Quantum Act: A Two-Pillar Framework for Regulation and Innovation, Kop 2025), but formal adoption is pending. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14262
[4] Outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–2025) for National Economic and Social Development and Vision 2035 of the People’s Republic of China. Fujian Provincial Government (China), August 9, 2021. Focuses on strategic science-tech areas including quantum information. https://www.fj.gov.cn/english/news/202108/t20210809_5665713.htm.
[5] OECD, 2025.
[6] Id.
[7] NIST finalized PQC standards: FIPS 203, 204, 205. https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2024/08/nist-releases-first-3-finalized-post-quantum-encryption-standards.
[8] https://hadea.ec.europa.eu/programmes/connecting-europe-facility/about/quantum-communication-infrastructure-euroqci_en
[9] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/rrf/timeline-recovery-and-resilience-facility/
[10] OECD, 2025.
[11] Id.
[12] Id.
