The number of qubits needed to crack internet encryption has dropped 200 times in seven years

[Marcus11]

A report published this week lays out a genuinely alarming trend. In 2019 researchers estimated it would take around 20 million qubits to break the RSA encryption that protects most of the internet. By 2025 that number had dropped to under a million. In early 2026 a team proposed an architecture that could potentially do it with fewer than 100,000. Nobody has actually built a machine that can do this yet, but the gap between theory and reality is closing faster than anyone expected. The year 2026 has been declared the Year of Quantum Security by a coalition that includes the FBI, NIST, and CISA, and they are urging organisations to start switching to new quantum-safe encryption right now.

Why 2026 Matters for Quantum Securitythequantuminsider.com

[Gaz90]

From 20 million qubits to potentially 100,000 in seven years is a terrifying trajectory if you think about what the next seven years might look like

[Coder65]

Worth noting none of this hardware actually exists yet. The gap between a paper estimate and a working machine is enormous

[Ann]

The harvest now decrypt later angle is the bit that keeps me up at night. Governments have probably already been stockpiling encrypted traffic for years

[SGHolly]

Good to see the FBI and NIST actually taking this seriously instead of waiting for the crisis to happen first