In ‘Quantum 101’ Session, WTO Trade Officials Hear Quantum Encryption Window May Close Within Five Years

Insider Brief

• A “Quantum 101” session at the World Trade Organization, co-organized by the permanent missions of Israel, Singapore and Switzerland, introduced trade negotiators to quantum technologies and their implications for trade.
• Speakers from industry, academia and national programs said the most direct link between quantum and trade is encryption, which secures payments, letters of credit, customs filings and e-signatures.
• Panelists also pointed to concentrated supply chains, diverging standards and a possible “quantum divide” between countries as trade questions that are already emerging.

The World Trade Organization’s (WTO) member delegations were told this week that the encryption underpinning international trade could be broken by quantum computers within roughly five years, and that the trading system has no shared definition yet of what it means to be “quantum safe.”

The warning came at a one-hour session in Geneva, organized by the permanent missions of Israel, Singapore and Switzerland to the WTO. The panel was moderated by Dylan Barry, executive director of the von Neumann Commission.

“We are not here to ask whether the WTO needs rules on quantum technologies,” Carolinn Hjalmroth, head of Israel’s Trade and Economic Mission to the WTO, Foreign Trade Administration, Ministry of Economy and Industry, told the room, adding, “We simply want to start to understand what is changing, what is realistic and what may matter for our economies.”