US imposes sanctions on companies helping China achieve quantum supremacy

The US Department of Commerce has added 8 high-tech Chinese companies to its blacklist for reasons of national security and foreign policy. You can read about this in the announcement published on the official website of the agency.

All Chinese companies included to this list with a gorgeous name "Commerce Lists Entities Involved in the Support of PRC Military Quantum Computing Applications, Pakistani Nuclear and Missile Proliferation, and Russia’s Military"are developing new technologies in the field of quantum computing. Among them are Shanghai QuantumCTek and Hefei National Physical Sciences Laboratory, as well as three subsidiaries of Corad Technology, which, according to the United States, sell American technologies to Iran, North Korea and various organizations associated with Chinese the military.

The US authorities, which see a Chinese threat in every coffee maker, justified the inclusion of these companies and organizations on the blacklist by the fact that through them the Chinese military can gain access to the most important US technologies. The imposition of these sanctions means that American companies cannot sell their quantum technologies to companies on this list.

The Commerce Department added that the listed companies have been working to gain access to top-secret quantum technology, which could help China significantly improve its submarine detection systems and intensify efforts to break into various US encryption systems.

It took the US government less than a month to respond to reports from China that a Chinese quantum computer a million times more powerful similar development by Google. It is clear that US sanctions will not prevent China from developing this area, but they will be able to slow down scientists from the Middle Kingdom for a while.

A source: reuters, commerce.gov

Illustrations: Ingram Pinn / Financial Times