Evidence as of October 9, 2026. Companion article to a Comuvia News video record. Every figure comes from that video's evidence packet — 72 retained sources and 60 attributed, excerpt-checked claims, captured October 7, 2026 — or from the record page. The packet's own caveat stands: attribution and located excerpts are checked, but truth and rights clearance require editorial review. Dates are day-level only.
Two sequences ran through quantum computing in 2026. A large amount of money changed hands. And several of the year's headline performance claims drew replies from researchers running ordinary computers.
Watch the video record — a 22-minute cut released on October 9, 2026. The video uses AI-generated narration and a synthetic presenter; the recordings inside it are real, unaltered excerpts from the channels named on screen.
Two terms recur. A qubit is a quantum bit: until measured it can hold a blend of zero and one. A logical qubit is one reliable qubit assembled from many noisy physical ones, with errors corrected as the computation runs. The error rate, not the qubit count, does the work.
The headline claim and the replies
| Claim on the record | What was claimed | The reply the record carries |
|---|---|---|
| IBM and the University of Chicago, July 30, 2026 | Three experiments described as quantum advantage; the release quotes IBM's Jay Gambetta saying the field is "firmly in the quantum advantage era" | A reported reproduction at the Singapore University of Technology and Design: all 2,051 outputs of the main experiment in 37.3 minutes on 256 graphics processors, retained with the arXiv paper |
| An earlier D-Wave quantum-supremacy claim | Advantage over classical simulation | The Simons Foundation, May 21, 2026: a Flatiron Institute result in Science reproduced the simulations by belief propagation, and the release carries the line "whenever we see these kinds of claims, we're always a bit skeptical". D-Wave's rebuttal of May 26 is retained beside it |
| The field as a whole | — | The Quantum Insider, January 12, 2026: in a poll of experts, fewer than half believed quantum advantage had been demonstrated |
The record does not adjudicate this; it retains claim, reply and date.
What the machines reported
- Quantinuum, August 11: near "five-nines" logical fidelity — an error rate approaching one in a hundred thousand operations — and Apollo on track. Its September 28 blog reports 64 error-detected logical qubits at a logical error rate of 2.8 × 10⁻⁴, which it puts at 4.28 times below the physical rate, and states "this is not an experimental platform".
- Google, reported by The Quantum Insider on July 10: a reinforcement-learning calibration method cut logical error rates by about 20%, published in Nature.
- Rigetti, 8-K exhibit of April 7: Cepheus-1-108Q generally available at 99.1% median two-qubit gate fidelity, 99.5% targeted. Infleqtion, September 24: 30 entangled logical qubits on Sqale. Microsoft, reported by SiliconANGLE on June 2: the Majorana 2 chip, and a scalable machine "as early as 2029".
- D-Wave, August 20: a gate-model roadmap toward 100 logical qubits by 2032, beyond the annealing approach it is known for.
- IonQ, investor day of September 8 reported by The Quantum Insider: a 256-qubit platform called Superion, deliveries targeted for 2027, about 10,000 physical qubits, and a manufacturable commercial system in 2028.
Those post-2026 dates are company roadmap dates, not verified schedules.
The money, from the filings
On May 21, 2026 the Commerce Department signed letters of intent to take non-controlling equity stakes in nine quantum companies — reported by Data Center Dynamics at $2.013 billion, including $1 billion to IBM for a superconducting quantum foundry subsidiary and $38 million to Diraq. Four agreements were signed on September 8. Quantinuum priced an upsized public offering on June 3 at $60.00 for 28,000,000 shares.
Reported revenue remains small. From the companies' releases and exhibits: IonQ $80.1 million and Quantinuum $8 million for the quarter, against Quantinuum's $597 million net loss; Rigetti $5.1 million on $541.3 million of cash; D-Wave $3.1 million on $546.2 million. PostQuantum.com's summary of McKinsey's Quantum Technology Monitor 2026 reports $12.6 billion invested in 2025, 97% of it private against 67% in 2024. Not investment advice.
Washington: two orders signed, one law still waiting
The White House fact sheet of June 22, 2026 describes Executive Orders 14413 and 14412: a national effort to develop the first quantum computer powerful enough to initiate the era of quantum-enabled scientific discovery, sensors and networks within five years, and the National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee reconstituted. Sidley Austin's July 1 summary adds the operative detail: the machine delivered to a Department of Energy facility, specifications within 90 days, sensors fielded by September 30, 2028, post-quantum key establishment by end-2030 and digital signatures by end-2031. The presidential-actions pages themselves refused capture and are cited by locator only. DARPA's benchmarking initiative aims to verify whether any approach can reach utility-scale operation by 2033.
The legislation has not kept pace. The Senate Commerce Committee passed the National Quantum Initiative Reauthorization Act unanimously on April 14, calling quantum technology a "game-changer" and extending the initiative to December 2034; the House Science Committee reported H.R. 8462 on April 29. Neither reached a floor vote. Congressional Research Service brief IN12704 of September 1 records a Senate procedural vote failing 50–46 on July 14.
Europe, and the rest of the world
The European Commission's Quantum Europe Strategy of July 2, 2025 aims to make the Union a global leader in quantum by 2030 and expects the sector to exceed €155 billion in global value by 2040. The Quantum Act that was to follow was still listed for second-quarter 2026 release on the European Parliament's legislative train as of September 20 — and remains a consultation, closing 16 October 2026. EuroHPC opened pilot access to Euro-Q-Exa, Lucy, Piast-Q and VLQ on June 25; Euro-Q-Exa was inaugurated on February 12 with 54 physical qubits, 150 due by year-end. The Quantum Insider reports the UK's £2 billion commitment of March 17 and Germany's €2 billion programme.
Elsewhere: Global Times reported Zuchongzhi 3.2 at 105 qubits below the error-correction threshold on December 23, 2025; ECNS reported the Tianyan-P2000 photonic machine at 2,682 photons on June 24, 2026; RIKEN announced a 256-qubit machine in April 2025, with 1,000 planned.
The dates already in the rulebook
Cryptographic migration is the one part with deadlines already in writing. The June order sets federal post-quantum key establishment at the end of 2030 and signatures at the end of 2031; PostQuantum.com's explainer of OMB M-26-15 puts agency migration plans at about October 22, 2026; the record lists 2035 among the dates to watch. Practice lags: Tech Times' July 24 report of a DigiCert survey of 1,001 respondents found 87% planning a migration and 7% deployed at scale. Nothing on the record claims a machine that can break today's keys exists.
What did not survive the source check
The record is candid about its own gaps — the part worth borrowing. Five figures from the research brief were dropped because no retained page carried them: a "$2.7 billion" total for the reauthorization bill (the Senate release gives no total), a "six times" growth figure for 2025 investment, the Commission's "€11 billion / 5 percent" lines, company market capitalisations, and a November 30 closing date for DARPA's Stage A call, whose proposals were in fact due September 30. Congress.gov, Gartner, BCG, Science, Business Wire and an NSA page, among others, returned 403 or dropped the connection; they are recorded as not retained, and anything they carried came from mirrors or was dropped.
Comuvia's judgement, labelled as such
Two things in the video are Comuvia's judgement, not evidence: the six positions mapped on the "is a useful quantum computer close?" axis are Comuvia's paraphrases, and the complexity rating — High — is Comuvia's own. Its grounds: the facts sit in filings, papers and orders while the dispute is about what they prove; and observability is mixed, since the papers are public but DARPA's assessments are not.
The dated checkpoints are not judgements: October 16, about October 22, then January 3, 2027, when this Congress ends and any unpassed bill dies; 2030, 2031 and 2035 for cryptography; 2033 for DARPA's verdict.
Comuvia News: evidence from the record. We cut this story again when a deadline produces a document, or a claim produces a reply.