Europe's next tech bet skips AI rules: draft Quantum Act pushes procurement, not regulation

POLITICO reported the draft on 31 October. It is the most concrete sign yet of how the EU wants to handle the technology after AI. It leans on funding and public procurement rather than compliance obligations. It asks governments to source quantum systems from EU-based companies or from countries with a strategic partnership on the technology.

"It's not about regulation. There's nothing to regulate," a senior Commission official told POLITICO. That line lands hard this week. European regulators are still arguing over how to enforce the AI Act and what to do about chatbots and copyright. The EU's own advisers are now weighing in on those subjects.

Brussels keeps comparing this to its chipmaking plan, the Chips Act 2.0, and its data centre package, the Cloud and AI Development Act. Both try to cut dependency on US technology by building capacity instead of writing rules. The quantum draft follows the same template.

Why the AI playbook is being dropped

The EU moved fast on AI. The Commission tabled its first proposal in April 2021, before ChatGPT existed, and talks closed in 2024. The result is a law that governs how a technology is used. European executives now describe that legacy as a cautionary tale. Jan Goetz, CEO of Finnish quantum company IQM, told POLITICO the EU's AI strategy was "very regulatory" while the US kept investing: "now we're in a situation where all of the big AI labs are in the U.S., the chips come from the U.S."

Théau Peronnin, CEO of French quantum firm Alice & Bob, drew the distinction the draft relies on. AI, he said, "is about usage of technology, it's a solution, whereas quantum is an infrastructure. It's a resource, it's hardware, it's computing power." His conclusion: "You don't regulate computing power, you regulate what you do with that compute power."

The security stakes are not small. Quantum machines could eventually break the encryption protecting modern communications and banking. POLITICO notes most research is still in the laboratory. Experts forecast wider availability within five years.

The money question is still open

Procurement mandates are cheap for Brussels to write and hard for member states to fund. The draft's stated aim is to stop national champions from failing to scale for lack of capital. That is the same problem that dogged European AI. The draft as reported does not make clear whether the November proposal carries new money.

European venture data offers context on the scale gap. Tech.eu's weekly recap, published 2 November, counted more than 60 funding deals worth over €1.3 billion across Europe last week. AI took €815.6 million and the UK alone accounted for €1 billion. That is a healthy week, not a quantum war chest.

Elsewhere the regulatory machine keeps running on older tracks. The Guardian reported on 2 November on 29 NHS trusts. NHS England listed them as "realising benefits" from Palantir's £330m federated data platform. The trusts said the system was not live or not in use. The Office for Statistics Regulation has taken the matter up under its casework function. Chi Onwurah, chair of the Commons science and technology committee, said serious questions need asking about whether the hype around Palantir's products matches reality.

That is the risk the Quantum Act is designed to avoid: a headline number, a procurement promise, and a delivery gap nobody can measure.

On the AI side, the argument has moved to edges. TechCrunch reported on 1 November that Anthropic is heading to public markets just as Wall Street loses appetite for heavy AI spending. Executives at Dazzle AI and OpenAI keep making comments that land badly with ordinary users. Europe's bet is that it can skip that phase by funding hardware first.

"Quantum is one of those [technologies] where we definitely can and should lead the pack," Peronnin told POLITICO.

That is a claim to test, not a result. The draft is due in November. The first real signal will be whether member states put procurement money behind it or treat the mandate as another unfunded Brussels instruction.