Alex Pruden, co-founder and CEO of the post-quantum security company Project Eleven, says quantum computing labs have told his firm directly that they are keeping some results unpublished, a claim he called “a fact.”
Pruden said on Unchained, in a livestream recorded Monday, Oct. 19, that “we’ve been told by quantum labs that they are not publishing certain results because they’ve been told not to or because they’re choosing not to” for reasons that “they don’t wanna create panic.” He added, “So we know it’s the case in quantum labs for sure.” He did not name any lab, describe the results or say who had told the labs not to publish.
Project Eleven builds post-quantum security tools for digital assets. On Oct. 7, it introduced Strongpoint, an institutional custody platform it is targeting for production in the fourth quarter of 2026.
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Pruden’s Oct. 8 Remarks
Pruden made a similar assertion on Oct. 8, in a roughly 71-second clip an X user posted that day, captioned on screen as The Rollup’s livestream from Quantum & Privacy Day, a TOKEN2049 Singapore side event. According to the post, he said Google and “the big quantum computing companies are self censoring,” and that “from our internal sources at some of these companies, we hear this too. They’re like, the government is not letting us post stuff.”
Google’s own public record describes one case in which it limited what it released. In a March 31 blog post on new estimates of the quantum resources needed to break 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography, Google said it “engaged with the U.S. government” and published a zero-knowledge proof instead of the underlying circuits, so the estimates could be checked “without providing a roadmap for bad actors.”
How the Remark Came Up
The Oct. 19 comment came during a discussion of Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake‘s Oct. 7 call for the industry to plan for a “bunker mode” in case AI-assisted mathematics cracks the signature schemes wallets rely on now, a call Unchained covered at the time. Project Eleven co-founder Conor Deegan said earlier in the exchange that whether AI frontier labs or “the quantum labs are sitting on breaks, obviously we can’t speak to that. We just don’t know.” After Deegan said the attackers he meant were AI frontier labs, Pruden said on the livestream that the same was “also true of quantum.”
In July, PostQuantum.com’s Marin Ivezic wrote that he expected progress toward a code-breaking quantum computer to keep accelerating while public announcements thin out. He said a rumor had reached him that some companies were sitting on unpublished results, calling it “corridor talk, that I cannot verify a word of it.”
Related Listen: Why People Are Worried AI Could Crack the Math That Secures Every Blockchain
The post Project Eleven CEO Calls it ‘a Fact’ that Quantum Labs Are Withholding Results appeared first on Unchained.
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