Quantum Responsibility Gets a Roadmap as the ResQT Community Maps Its Future Priorities

Quantum technologies are advancing rapidly across computing, communication and sensing, and with them has come a growing recognition that the field needs an ethical, social and geopolitical compass. A new community statement published in the journal Ethics and Society on 3 September 2026 sets out, for the first time in a structured and accessible form, what the Responsible Quantum Technologies community, known as ResQT, has been discussing since its founding in 2021. The paper, a synthesis of contributions from twenty-five authors affiliated with twenty-one institutions across twelve countries on four continents, maps the community’s current work and identifies the priorities it believes will shape responsible quantum innovation in the years ahead.

The ResQT community formed in 2021 as part of a workshop series organised by Zeki C. Seskir at the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis within the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology in Germany. The event became an annual gathering in Karlsruhe, with the sixth workshop held in April 2026. Over five years, the series has hosted 138 speakers and panelists from 70 institutions, drawing researchers in physics and engineering, scholars from science and technology studies, technology assessment, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and political science, education researchers, and practitioners including artists, corporate outreach managers and equity, diversity and inclusion officers. Most participants were professionals, professors or doctoral researchers, and the most prominent affiliations were Delft University of Technology, KIT-ITAS and IBM.

The community is deliberately pluralistic. It has no rigid boundaries and requires only that members work on the impacts of quantum technologies. There is no aim to reach a common consensus on what responsible quantum technology must be, which effects are most likely or which focus matters most; instead, a plurality of opinions is discussed openly. The authors stress that the resulting structure is not a fixed taxonomy but a practical way of organising recurring concerns, and that the paper remains a situated community perspective rather than a generalizable empirical account of responsible quantum technology debates.

The paper identifies eight thematic areas through which the community addresses the consequences of quantum technologies. In ethics and Responsible Research and Innovation, members are identifying and exploring ethical challenges by drawing lessons from nanotechnology, classical computing and artificial intelligence, and are working to operationalise ethics and RRI principles into frameworks, tools and methods suited to researchers, entrepreneurs and policymakers. In equity, diversity and inclusion, the community analyses why disparities in access to resources, education and opportunities, the so-called quantum divide, persist, and researches grassroots initiatives such as the Strengthening and Entangling Global Quantum Roots project and the Quantum Grassroots initiative that aim to widen access and increase representation.

Sustainability is another active front. Quantum computers are primarily being designed to surpass classical systems in computational power for niche applications, but a growing research focus explores their potential to provide an energy advantage. Establishing a standard for benchmarking performance per Watt is considered vital for meaningful assessments, and the Quantum Energy Initiative and its associated IEEE working group, in which ResQT members are involved, are centralising efforts to improve physical resource efficiency and create an energy standard. The community also proposes social strategies rather than strict restrictions, such as trialling artificially expensive energy with internal reinvestment, fostering friendly lab competitions, or reporting CO2 equivalent costs in publications.

Geopolitics forms a fourth strand. Analytical work investigates how quantum technologies are framed as a sovereignty technology and a national security concern, exploring whether this framing acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy that fuels nationalism and global competition. Normative research focuses on mitigating the negative consequences of these dynamics, asking how tensions can be mediated, how openness in research affects outcomes, and what role international collaboration should play. The community’s overarching goal is to ensure that quantum technologies do not become a tool for division or conflict, and to prevent the onset of a new cold war driven by technological rivalry and mistrust.

Education and workforce development is a fifth area, with the community examining how students reason and learn about quantum technologies, developing research-based curricular materials and assessment tools such as the Quantum Computing Conceptual Survey, and investigating the effects of metaphors and quantum hype on education. Outreach and science communication form a sixth, addressing the missing consensus on what constitutes optimal communication in the field, the role of metaphors beyond the traditional picture of Schrödinger’s cat, and how communication failures can create space for misleading or exaggerated claims to thrive. Art-science interaction is the seventh, exploring how quantum art can communicate the field’s complexities, foster immersive experiences, and involve artists as equals in co-creating quantum technologies. Governance is the eighth, focusing on funding mechanisms, anticipatory governance, and the integration of value-based aspects into the innovation system.

Across these topics, several recurring concerns emerge. The first is the need for assessment strategies sensitive to the heterogeneity of quantum domains, their different levels of maturity and their distinct risk profiles, supporting transparent risk-ranking and prioritisation. A second is the risk of a growing quantum divide, disparities in access to quantum education, funding and applications, which calls for equity, diversity and inclusion to remain central. Sustainability is a third pressing issue, requiring both technical innovations to reduce environmental impact and policies that prevent quantum technologies from deepening existing inequalities. Trust and engagement are equally vital, and the authors argue that lessons should be drawn from past technologies such as artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, where governance struggled to keep pace with innovation.

The community’s future priorities are distilled into concrete research questions. In ethics and RRI, these include what methods are needed to understand ethical challenges, whether lessons can be learned from past emerging technologies, what best practice looks like, how it can be communicated and operationalised, how societal impact can be shaped toward what many refer to as quantum for good, how access can be made equitable and global, and what current and potential future opportunities and risks exist, including dual-use and military applications. In geopolitics, future work must address how technical standards could contribute to geopolitical division or instead promote global cooperation, how to ensure access is equitable and independent from political agendas, and how policy frameworks can keep pace with rapid technical developments while supporting norm-building toward the non-weaponisation of quantum technologies.

The authors emphasise that responsible quantum technology should be an integral part of quantum development rather than an afterthought, so that quantum technologies evolve toward a future that is technologically advanced and beneficial for all. They acknowledge that the paper is a snapshot shaped by the perspectives of its contributing authors, and that certain perspectives, for example from non-European countries, remain to be included more directly. The next step, they argue, is to move from identifying problems to implementing responsible innovations in practice, fostering inclusive dialogue among all stakeholders, creating collaborative initiatives, and developing a truly multidisciplinary approach as quantum technologies become increasingly embedded in societal infrastructures.

Subject of Research: A community statement mapping current directions and future priorities for responsible quantum technologies across ethics, equity, sustainability, geopolitics, education, outreach, art and governance.

Article Title: Current and Future Directions for Responsible Quantum Technologies: A ResQT Community Perspective

Article References: Schmidt, A., Artaud, A., Aydinoglu, A. U., Bötticher, A., Araiza Bravo, R., Chiofalo, M. L. M., Coates, R., Ercan, I., Grinbaum, A., Haworth, E., Ten Holter, C., de Jong, E., Karstens, B., Kettemann, M. C., Knörr, A., Lee, C. A. L., Marco, F., Mehnert, W., Meyer, J. C., … Seskir, Z. C. (2026). Current and Future Directions for Responsible Quantum Technologies: A ResQT Community Perspective. Ethics and Society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-026-00522-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11569-026-00522-2

Keywords: responsible quantum technologies, ResQT community, quantum ethics, quantum divide, sustainability, geopolitics, education and workforce, science communication, art-science interaction, governance, Responsible Research and Innovation, Current