2025 Year In Review The Year We Crossed The Rubicon From Quantum

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Jan 2, 2026, 4:12 PM

2025 year in review the year we crossed the rubicon from quantum

EDRM Editor’s Note: EDRM is proud to publish Ralph Losey’s advocacy and analysis. All images in the article are by Ralph Losey using AI. Originally published on EDRM.net. This article remains the intellectual property of Ralph Losey and is shared with permission. As I sit here reflecting on 2025—a year that began with the mind-bending mathematics of the multiverse and ended with the gritty reality of cross-examining algorithms—I am struck by a singular realization. We have moved past the era of mere AI adoption.

We have entered the era of entanglement, where we must navigate the new physics of quantum law using the ancient legal tools of skepticism and verification. We are learning how to merge with AI and remain in control of our minds, our actions. This requires human training, not just AI training. As it turns out, many lawyers are well prepared by past legal training and skeptical attitude for this new type of human training. We can quickly learn to train our minds to maintain control while becoming entangled with advanced AIs and the accelerated reasoning and memory capacities they can bring. In 2024, we looked at AI as a tool, a curiosity, perhaps a threat.

By the end of 2025, the tool woke up—not with consciousness, but with “agency.” We stopped typing prompts into a void and started negotiating with “agents” that act and reason. We learned to treat these agents not as oracles, but as ‘consulting experts’—brilliant but untested entities whose work must remain privileged until rigorously cross-examined and verified by a human attorney. That put the human legal minds in control and stops the hallucinations in what I called “H-Y-B-R-I-D” workflows of the modern law office. We are still way smarter than they are and can keep our own agency and control. But for how long? The AI abilities are improving quickly but so are own own abilities to use them.

We can be ready. We must. To stay ahead, we should begin the training in earnest in 2026. Quantum computing hogged the headlines in 2025 and it was ok to say it was the year of quantum--or maybe qubits--after just a few months. The quantum computing developments were flying, but it's worth noting that we're years away from big commercial adoption. Nevertheless, CxOs need to get ready.

After all, the boardroom is getting tired of AI. The AI trade lost steam. Boardrooms are going to start asking about your quantum computing plans in 3, 2, 1. Why was 2025 the year of quantum? For starters, there was a new development almost weekly. Pure play quantum stocks were hot.

Hyperscale cloud players were deadly serious about quantum, with AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud all running credible efforts. Quantinuum threaded the needle between AI and quantum computing. IBM scaled aggressively. And real use cases emerged as companies like IonQ cited projects with DARPA, AstraZeneca, and others. One thing worth noting here is that 2025 became the year of quantum readiness and development rather than deployment. That said, CxOs need to start thinking about quantum.

Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller broke down how you should be thinking about the year of quantum. Welcome to our look back at some of the most impactful quantum technology stories of 2025. This year marked a period of significant advancement, moving beyond theoretical breakthroughs toward demonstrable progress in building practical quantum systems. From record-breaking qubit fidelity and expanding qubit counts to innovative approaches in error correction and the burgeoning integration of quantum and classical computing, the landscape of quantum technology continued to rapidly evolve. 2025 will be remembered as a pivotal year where the foundational elements of quantum computing began to coalesce, hinting at the transformative potential that lies ahead. These stories represent not just scientific achievements, but concrete steps towards a future where quantum technology reshapes industries and unlocks solutions to previously intractable problems.

Researchers at IonQ, led by Dr. Chris Monroe and Nobel Laureate Dr. David Wineland, demonstrated the first experimental quantum logic gate using trapped ions in 1995 at NIST, transitioning quantum computing from theory to tangible hardware. This foundational experiment, with the physics still relevant today, enabled IonQ to prioritize engineering, scaling, and ultimately become the first public pure-play quantum computing company. In the quest for error correction, entagledfuture.com on conjunction wuth Quantum Zeitgeist have launched a logical qubit tracker. Expect regular updates on the milestones being hit in the quest for fault tolerant quantum computing.

Researchers at IBM Quantum have demonstrated the first successful learning experiment of a Lindblad model—a crucial step for understanding and mitigating errors—on a 156-qubit superconducting quantum processor. Their new method analyzes time-series data to map errors and enable more accurate control, utilizing a robust curve-fitting procedure and a specialized solver to ensure a physically valid and scalable model. November 4, 2025 — Written by Daily Pixel Tech & Innovation Desk The world of computing just took a quantum leap. In 2025, several tech giants and research institutions announced breakthroughs that moved quantum computing out of the laboratory and into real-world applications — from climate modeling to medical drug design. For decades, traditional computers — even the fastest supercomputers — have operated on binary bits (0s and 1s).

But quantum computers use qubits, which can exist in multiple states simultaneously. This allows them to process vast amounts of information in parallel, making them exponentially more powerful for certain types of calculations. This year, IBM, Google Quantum AI, and China’s Origin Quantum all achieved record-breaking milestones. IBM unveiled its “Condor Q” processor with over 1,200 stable qubits, while Google demonstrated a system capable of performing a task in 90 seconds that would take a classical supercomputer nearly 47 years. Even more remarkable, a startup called QuantaX Labs introduced cloud-based quantum services, allowing developers and researchers worldwide to run quantum simulations remotely — no billion-dollar facility required. The UNESCO International Year of Quantum Science and Technology in 2025 presented an opportunity to raise awareness of quantum science and technology for the general public, private sector, and government.

2025 was a year of exceptional progress, commercial wins, and growth. But more than anything, it was the year we transformed the promise of quantum technology into something useful with actual commercial value. On World Quantum Day, we announced that we had achieved the first true commercial quantum advantage in GPS-denied navigation. We used quantum sensors to help navigate when GPS was unavailable, outperforming the best conventional alternative by 50X (soon after increasing to >100X). This achievement earned acclaim as one of TIME Magazine’s Best Innovations of 2025, but more on that later. Q-CTRL pushed the quantum sector over the threshold of advantage in sensing and set the community up for the same in quantum computing over the coming years.

And our technological leadership was reflected commercially, with over $50M in sales and contract wins this year! Almost no one else in the sector comes anywhere close. This was a year of AI agents, reasoning and scientific discovery. In 2025, Google made significant AI research breakthroughs with models like Gemini 3 and Gemma 3. These advancements improved AI's reasoning, multimodality, and efficiency, leading to new products and features across Google's portfolio. Expect more AI-driven innovations in science, computing, and tools for global challenges as Google prioritizes responsible AI development and collaboration.

Google had a super productive year with AI research. They made their AI models way better at thinking and understanding things. Google also made AI more useful in everyday products and helped people be more creative. Plus, they used AI to make big steps in science and to tackle global problems. Your browser does not support the audio element. 2025 has been a year of extraordinary progress in research.

With artificial intelligence, we can see its trajectory shifting from a tool to a utility: from something people use to something they can put to work. If 2024 was about laying the multimodal foundations for this era, 2025 was the year AI began to really think, act and explore the world alongside us. With quantum computing, we made progress towards real-world applications. And across the board, we helped turn research into reality, with more capable and useful products and tools making a positive impact on people's lives today. A year of technology headlines. Image: Unsplash/Robynne O

In 2025, frontier technologies crossed key thresholds – not just advancing, but beginning to scale. From quantum security and spatial computing to climate and food systems innovation, this was a year when convergence turned into consequence. Across industries and geographies, we began to see technologies that once were at the edge of experimentation begin shaping real-world decisions: how banks secure data in a post-quantum future, how satellites inform climate and... This end-of-year edition of our Frontier Technologies & Innovation wrapper brings together the developments that mattered most in 2025. Drawing on the Forum’s research, global convenings and innovation communities, it highlights the breakthroughs that moved from promise to deployment and the leadership choices now required to ensure they deliver shared, sustainable value. There’s only a few days left in the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, but we’re still finding plenty to celebrate here at Physics World HQ thanks to a long list of groundbreaking...

Here are a few of our favourite stories from the past 12 months. By this point in 2025, “negative time” may sound like the answer to the question “How long have I got left to buy holiday presents for my loved ones?” Earlier in the year, though,... While experts have cautioned against interpreting “negative time” too literally – we aren’t in time machine territory here – it does seem like there’s something interesting going on in this system of ultracold rubidium... It is a truth universally acknowledged that any sufficiently advanced technology must be in want of a simple system to operate it. In April, the quantum world passed this milestone thanks to Stephanie Wehner and colleagues at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Their operating system is called QNodeOS, and they developed it with the aim of improving access to quantum computing for the 99.99999% percent of people who aren’t (and mostly don’t need to be) intimately...

Another advantage of QNodeOS is that it makes it easier for classical and quantum machines (and quantum devices built with different qbit architectures) to communicate with each other. How big does an object have to be before it stops being quantum and starts behaving like the billiard-ball-like solids familiar from introductory classical mechanics courses? It’s a question that featured in our annual “Breakthrough of the Year” back in 2021, when two independent teams demonstrated quantum entanglement in pairs of 10-micron drumheads, and we’re returning to it this year... In one boundary-pushing experiment, Massimiliano Rossi and colleagues at ETH Zurich, Switzerland and the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona, Spain cooled silica nanoparticles enough to extend their wave-like behaviour to 73 pm. In another study, Kiyotaka Aikawa and colleagues at the University of Tokyo, Japan performed the first quantum mechanical squeezing on a nanoparticle, narrowing its velocity distribution at the expense of its momentum distribution. We may not know exactly where the quantum-classical boundary is yet, but the list of quantum behaviours we’ve observed in usually-not-quantum objects keeps getting longer.

2025 Year In Review The Year We Crossed The Rubicon From Quantum

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