Commission on U.S. Quantum Primacy, Preliminary Report of 10 November 2026: What Young, Luján and Bajraktari's Panel Asks For in Foundry Access, NIST Benchmarks and State Post-Quantum Migration
What the Commission on U.S. Quantum Primacy published on 10 November 2026
The Commission on U.S. Quantum Primacy, convened by the Special Competitive Studies Project and co-chaired by Senators Todd Young and Ben Ray Luján with SCSP president Ylli Bajraktari, released its preliminary report, Defining the American Quantum Era, on 10 November 2026. The 19-page document organizes ten near-term priorities under four elements: discovery, development, deployment and scale. Its main proposals are a national quantum software program modeled on the Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Project, a NIST-led public-private benchmarking and interoperability effort, and a National Quantum Foundry Access Program for shared fabrication, packaging and testing across hardware types.
Which figures the report gives, and which decisions it leaves to spring 2027
The report sets U.S. strengths in research and software against Chinese advantages in supply chains: cleanrooms at roughly $150 per square foot in China against $800 to $1,000 in the United States, and about $3 billion a year in Chinese public quantum funding against about $1 billion in U.S. federal R&D. It proposes no budget for any of its own programs. It also asks for faster post-quantum cryptography adoption in critical infrastructure and state and local governments, the priority with the most direct civic reach, since it touches county offices, utilities and the citizen data they hold. The commissioners include the chief executives or research heads of IonQ, IBM, Google Quantum AI and SandboxAQ, which matters for how the proposed benchmarks would be governed. The final report, due in spring 2027, is to set out policy recommendations, infrastructure needs and an implementation strategy.
New York City's $29.2 Million QFab Award to NYU, Announced 14 October 2026: How the City's 15% Share of Quantum IP Proceeds and Three Advisory Seats Would Work
What New York City and NYU announced on 14 October 2026
Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani, Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su and NYCEDC chief executive Anthony Shorris announced that the city will award $29.2 million to New York University for QFab, a quantum fabrication facility of 23,000 square feet at 770 Broadway. NYU adds $255 million for construction and ten years of operations. The facility is expected to open in 2030 with cleanrooms, cryogenics and equipment for making and testing quantum chips and components, open to researchers, students, startups and established companies.
What the city receives in return for its quantum investment
The city gets three seats on the QFab Executive Advisory Board. When intellectual property is created at QFab using tools the city funded, it also receives 15% of NYU Central Administration's proceeds from that IP, including equity, royalties, milestone payments and patent licenses. The city calls this a first-of-its-kind agreement. Read closely, the 15% applies to one slice of one revenue stream. This post reconstructs the deal from the public announcement, compares it with the federal Bayh-Dole rules of 1980 and the US government's passive 9.9% Intel stake of 2025, and lists what the unpublished agreement still has to settle.
The Quantum Contest Moves Upstream
The contest before the computer
Two July funding calls reveal where the quantum race is moving. Google Research is asking universities for algorithms that can work within the severe limits of early fault-tolerant machines. Germany’s Fraunhofer INQUBATOR is asking companies to bring real problems in medicine, cybersecurity, insurance and automotive logistics into a ten-month testing program. Together, the calls turn early fault-tolerant quantum computing into a contest over which questions deserve scarce research time.
Why use-case selection matters
A grant call looks administrative, yet its categories can shape laboratories, patents, skills and public investment. The winning proposals will help define what counts as a plausible quantum application before the hardware is mature enough to settle the argument. That gives program design an unusual form of market power: it can direct scientists toward particular social needs while giving firms an early view of technical limits.
The public bargain inside the funding
The strongest proposals will connect resource estimates to human consequences. A medical optimization claim carries different duties from a materials or logistics claim because errors, access and accountability fall on different people. Quentir reads the two calls as a test of quantum industrial policy: whether public and corporate sponsors can reward intellectual ambition without allowing speculative use cases to harden into procurement assumptions.