When Group of Seven (G7) leaders gather in Évian-les-Bains from June 15 to 17, quantum technologies should remain on their agenda for the second consecutive year. That alone would mark a shift. For most of the past decade, quantum policy lived in science ministries and research councils. At Kananaskis in June 2025, the G7 adopted the Common Vision for the Future of Quantum Technologies, formally placing quantum on the leaders’ table and naming the right concerns: secure supply chains, research integrity, trusted ecosystems and the timely adoption of quantum-resilient security measures.
Kananaskis deserves recognition as an important step. Its machinery, however, was light. The statement created a joint working group and announced voluntary research calls, policy dialogues and societal-impact assessments. At the same time, it contains no timelines, no benchmarks, no procurement commitments and no mechanism for holding members to implementation. One year on, the question for Évian is direct: Does the G7 intend to govern quantum technology, or to keep describing it?
The question has grown more urgent because the stakes have widened. Quantum is no longer only a competitiveness or national security issue; it is becoming part of the infrastructure for planetary-scale challenges and opportunities: secure communications, climate and energy systems, health care, agriculture, financial stability, supply-chain resilience and strategic security. Much of this capability remains prospective. Fault-tolerant machines that transform drug design or climate modelling do not yet exist. That is the strongest argument for building the architecture now, while the field is still fluid enough to shape. Central banks already treat the file as systemic: the Banque de France and the Bank of Canada co-chair the G7 central banks’ Quantum Technologies Working Group, which published its first reference report in May 2026 on the implications of quantum technologies for the financial system. When the institutions responsible for financial stability begin mapping quantum risk, the subject has left the laboratory.
The declaratory layer of quantum governance is also now well populated. On May 28, 2026, the Council of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) adopted its Recommendation on Quantum Technologies, the first intergovernmental standard for the responsible development and use of these systems, built around democratic values, secure technology access, collaboration and accountability. The principles are sound. They are also familiar. The recommendation reflects a broader convergence around responsible quantum innovation, including the 10 principles my colleagues and I developed at Stanford University and the legal-ethical framework for quantum technology I proposed at Yale University in 2021, both of which helped shape subsequent work by the World Economic Forum; the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and the OECD. National assessments point the same way: A multidisciplinary expert panel of the Council of Canadian Academies, chaired by the late Raymond Laflamme, spent two years examining the responsible adoption of quantum technologies and reached conclusions that G7 governments can act on today.
That convergence is welcome, and it carries a message: The conceptual groundwork is done. Between the Kananaskis vision, the OECD recommendation and a growing shelf of national quantum strategies, the G7 does not lack agreed language. A further statement of shared values at Évian would cost little and change less. What remains is implementation, and implementation is precisely what voluntary coordination delivers slowly, unevenly or never.
Five Decisions for Évian
The first element of a practical quantum agenda is post-quantum cryptography migration. The harvest-now, decrypt-later threat makes migration a present-tense security problem with an unknown deadline that no government can set or postpone. The engineering case is hardening as well. California Institute of Technology-led work on reconfigurable neutral-atom architectures indicates that some cryptographically relevant attacks may be possible with orders of magnitude fewer qubits than earlier assumptions suggested, and Google has set 2029 as the target for completing its own cryptographic migration. When a leading vendor gives itself three years, governments that have given themselves 10 should take notice. Several G7 members have published national timetables, but they diverge in scope, pace and ambition. Leaders should converge on shared migration milestones for critical infrastructure, require cryptographic inventories and crypto-agility in public procurement, and report progress annually against dates rather than intentions.
The second is trusted and resilient supply chains. Quantum capability rests on fragile upstream inputs, including cryogenics, photonics, specialized lasers, isotopically enriched materials and precision fabrication tools. The Kananaskis text acknowledged this dependency; the follow-through requires a joint chokepoint assessment, coordinated diversification and trusted-partner sourcing, and agreement on which narrow set of inputs warrants stronger controls. Resilience also runs through workforce. China is converting scale in science, engineering and industrial policy into quantum capability. The G7 answer lies in pooled training pipelines, secure research exchanges and talent pathways that treat allied mobility as a strategic asset.
The third is standards-based governance. Standards bodies are where the technical defaults of the quantum era will be set, covering interoperability, certification, benchmarking and assurance. If G7 members engage these venues separately, they will inherit defaults set by dominant vendors, less-aligned coalitions or whoever shows up first. A common position on quantum standards, backed by procurement, would do more for trusted ecosystems than any communiqué.
The fourth is dual-use coordination. Export controls on quantum technologies are increasingly adopted member by member, with diverging thresholds and licence practices that risk fragmenting allied markets without necessarily slowing determined adversaries. What is needed is a shared analytical discipline for these interventions. The right test is whether controls are the least trade-restrictive, security-sufficient and innovation-preserving measures available, so that security policy protects the quantum industrial commons without strangling it.
And finally, the fifth is market power. Early quantum advantage is concentrating in a small number of firms and states that control compute access, patent portfolios and scarce talent. Left unattended, the quantum transition will reproduce the concentration dynamics of the cloud and artificial-intelligence economy. As Tracey Forrest and I argued in a recent CIGI policy brief: Who benefits from quantum is a design question, and it is being answered now, by default, in favour of capital-, compute- and talent-rich incumbents.
From Vision to Machinery
These decisions do not require a treaty. Instead, they require leaders to upgrade the mandate of the working group they created at Kananaskis and converting it into a delivery body with named products: a common post-quantum cryptography milestone schedule, a chokepoint assessment, a standards road map, a dual-use controls playbook and a market-structure report — each with a deadline, a responsible institution and an obligation to report back to leaders at the 2027 summit. Finance ministers should fold the central banks’ quantum work into the same reporting line. The value lies in that administrative discipline: turning summit language into routines, reporting lines and incentives that outlast the summit itself. Governance built from explicit controls, lifecycle gates, documentation and assurance can be audited and scaled — principles alone cannot. They are the necessary baseline, not a substitute for implementation.
The standing objection is that the G7 moves by consensus, and consensus favours caution. The record suggests otherwise. The G7 built coordinated sanctions architecture in months and launched the Hiroshima AI Process within a year. Quantum has already had its agenda-setting summit and its principles instrument; it should not need a third round of declaratory politics.
The G7 has demonstrated that it can agree quantum matters; the OECD has shown that the principles are ready. Évian will show whether the G7’s members can convert that agreement into working machinery while the transition is still governable. A third year of well-crafted language would tell its own story: that the G7 has chosen commentary over governance, and that the defaults of the quantum age will be written elsewhere.
