Microsoft Quantum Computing Claims Face New Scrutiny

A new critique in the scientific journal Nature is raising fresh questions about Microsoft’s claimed quantum computing breakthrough, which underpinned the company’s announcement of a working quantum system by 2029. Quantum computers have the potential to solve scientific and cybersecurity problems beyond the reach of conventional machines.

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The development of quantum computing has become a priority for U.S. President Donald Trump's administration, which invested USD 2 billion in the field and this week set goals for a scientific quantum system by 2028. Like rivals IBM, Alphabet’s Google, and other technology companies, Microsoft is developing its own quantum computer.

While competitors engineer machines based on better-understood quantum technologies, Microsoft has spent nearly two decades pursuing new scientific ground. This approach, Microsoft asserts, could help it leapfrog competitors.

In a formal reply to the critique and an interview, Microsoft stated it stands behind its research and that its quantum program is making practical progress despite any concerns raised. Microsoft’s scientific efforts have previously drawn skepticism.

Two Microsoft-backed papers were previously retracted from Nature, and editors flagged alerts about possible research problems in two others, one in Nature and another in Science. Microsoft said the retracted papers in Nature were done outside its laboratories, and it did not review the data in them before publication.

The peer-reviewed critique published in Nature on Wednesday by Henry Legg, a lecturer in quantum physics at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, raises concerns about a fifth paper, published in February 2025, and an associated press announcement. This paper, which is not being retracted, is central to Microsoft’s subsequent quantum efforts.

Microsoft publicly stated last year that it had found the Majorana, a long-theorised subatomic particle central to its approach. However, this discovery has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal such as Nature.

The February 2025 Nature paper made a narrower claim: that Microsoft had developed software to identify a minute gap in an otherwise highly conductive wire. This gap is significant because qubits, the basic units of quantum computers, are powerful but fragile, often losing their state within fractions of a second.

Microsoft states that finding a stable gap in a conductive wire is part of a process that could create longer-lasting, more useful qubits. Legg, however, found Microsoft’s software “yielded inconsistent and misreported outcomes.”

He also noted that a broader dataset released by Microsoft, but not included in the paper, showed random noise with no clear evidence of the gap Microsoft claimed to find. Legg compared the effort to “finding an image of Jesus in toast” by looking through an entire bakery’s worth of loaves.

“If you’re looking into something which is essentially just random physics, eventually you will find the Jesus in your toast,” Legg said. In its reply in Nature, Microsoft defended its claims, stating the software was a “practical tuning tool” to find suitable places on its chips to place qubits.

Chetan Nayak, who oversees Microsoft’s quantum hardware efforts, told Reuters in an interview that the code works well enough that Microsoft regularly uses it to set up chips now carrying out quantum computing operations. Nayak added, “It’s almost like arguing, is flight possible or not? And then you’re standing next to an airplane. Well, why don’t you hop in and take a ride?”

Sergey Frolov, a University of Pittsburgh physicist who has also criticised Microsoft’s work, said Microsoft lacks the longstanding evidence supporting the approaches taken by rivals such as IBM and Quantinuum that do not rely on the existence of the Majorana. These competitors do not rely on the existence of the Majorana.

“Neither Microsoft nor anyone else has laid a foundation where it is clear that these (Majorana-based) advances are plausible, through a series of reliable experiments,” Frolov said. “On the contrary, we have a series of papers that keep being challenged at the very basic level, by different people.”

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• Microsoft’s quantum computing claims and 2029 system goal face new scrutiny from a Nature journal critique.

• The critique, by Henry Legg of the University of St. Andrews, questions software related to identifying a stable gap in a conductive wire.

• Microsoft maintains its research is sound and its quantum program is making practical progress, despite past retractions and alerts regarding other papers.

  
  

Source: Reuters