In a recent Foreign Policy op-ed, Mauritz Kop, a fellow and visiting legal scholar at Stanford University, and columnist Vivek Wadhwa warned that an emerging technology known as quantum computing is, compared to AI, “an even more powerful emerging technology with the potential to wreak havoc, especially if it is combined with AI.” They added, “We urgently need to … prevent it from getting into the wrong hands before it is too late.”

The danger is that nefarious actors could try out combinations that could crack cybersecurity encryptions “almost instantaneously,” Kop and Wadhwa write. The United States, Russia, India and several European countries are known to be pursuing quantum computer projects.

“On both sides of the Atlantic, AI regulation is virtually nonexistent at the moment,” says Kop of Stanford. But a proposed EU law to regulate AI could have a sweeping global impact.

“The world’s failure to rein in the demon of AI … should serve to be a profound warning” that a future technology, quantum computing, needs to be regulated in a timely fashion, wrote Wadhwa and Kop. “We urgently need to understand this technology’s potential impact, regulate it, and prevent it from getting into the wrong hands before it is too late. The world must not repeat the mistakes it made by refusing to regulate AI.”