President Donald Trump signed two executive orders on Monday aimed at strengthening America’s quantum research and cyber defenses. The orders build on priorities from Trump’s first term and address one of the most serious emerging national security threats: the possibility that foreign adversaries could use future quantum computers to crack today’s encryption and expose sensitive American data.
During his first term, Trump signed an executive order establishing the National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee, overseen by the president, the energy secretary, and the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Overall, Trump’s order was issued “to ensure continued American leadership in quantum information science and technology applications.”
Although Trump took much of the credit for this committee and its goals, its foundation lay in a bipartisan bill titled the National Quantum Initiative Act, which directed the president to “establish the goals and priorities for a 10-year plan to accelerate the development of quantum information science and technology applications.” This bill and Trump’s executive order went into effect in 2018.
About four years after that committee was established, OpenAI released its groundbreaking artificial intelligence model, ChatGPT. While AI has been around for decades, what made ChatGPT groundbreaking was its availability to the masses, allowing children and scientists alike to generate code and text.
Since the release of an ever-growing array of public AI chatbots, cybersecurity professionals have warned about the potential for AI-assisted data breaches targeting both the government and the public.
In a November 2025 report about the use of its agentic AI model, Claude, in a massive espionage campaign that targeted the healthcare sector, emergency services, and government and religious institutions, Anthropic said, “These attacks are likely to only grow in their effectiveness. … We’re continually working on new methods of investigating and detecting large-scale, distributed attacks like this one.”
And Anthropic was right: These attacks have only become more frequent and more sophisticated.
In early May, Google’s Threat Intelligence Group released a report detailing attempted high-level hacks using a zero-day exploit. This type of exploit is especially dangerous because it was previously undetected and has no ready patch. The cybercriminals used agentic AI to discover and attempt to take advantage of this vulnerability.
According to Politico, John Hultquist, the chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, said, “For every zero-day we can trace back to AI, there are probably many more out there. … Threat actors are using AI to boost the speed, scale, and sophistication of their attacks.”
But AI-assisted hacking is only one part of the threat. The larger long-term danger is what cybersecurity experts call “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks. Foreign adversaries can steal encrypted American data today and save it for later, hoping to decrypt it once quantum computers become powerful enough to break current cryptographic systems.
“Ongoing cyber activity against our Nation also presents the risk of adversaries collecting United States information now, and decrypting it later once large-scale quantum computers are operational,” a fact sheet released by the White House reads. “In light of these threats, the United States must take steps to strengthen cryptographic protections for the Nation’s sensitive data, critical infrastructure, and digital economy.”
That is why Trump’s executive orders matter. They push the federal government toward post-quantum cryptography, strengthening the locks that protect American data, while also encouraging the development of quantum computing, sensing, and networking capabilities that will be vital to future national defense.
In other words, the administration is trying to solve both sides of the problem: protecting American systems from the next generation of cyber threats while making sure the U.S., not China or another adversary, leads the next generation of computing.
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“Today, as other nations move quickly to challenge American leadership, the United States must take a cohesive, whole-of-government approach to accelerate deployment and commercialization of quantum computing, sensing, and networking,” one executive order reads.
As agentic AI grows more sophisticated and cyberattacks become faster and harder to detect, America needs stronger countermeasures. Trump’s quantum push is not a science-fiction luxury. It is a necessary step to protect the country’s secrets, infrastructure, and technological edge.