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Paper long abstract

Quantum information technologies (QITs) – e.g., quantum computers, quantum communication, quantum sensing – are expected to bring profound disruptions in our societies (WRR 2021) constituting key enabling infrastructures for other devices, services, and applications, including AI (Timmers, 2023). In this regard, it is crucial to explore, since today, anticipatory (de Jong, 2022) precautionary (Taylor, 2020) approaches to the governance of QITs.

Normative proposals already exist (Perrier, 2022; World Economic Forum, 2022; Kop, 2025). Overall, these proposals rest on top-down path-dependent approaches which risk reinforcing today’s multipolar scenario, triggering the geopoliticization and siloing of QITs (Taddeo et al. 2024; Shelley-Egan & Vermaas 2025).

To avoid such trends, I follow up on Calzati and de Kerckhove’s (2024) ideas of QITs as pharmakological technologies (both poison and antidote; cf. Stiegler, 1998) and of a communitarian model for the governance of QITs. Notably, I outline a polycentric governance for QITs, informed by republican approaches to the digital transformation (Susskind 2022; Hoeksema, 2023; Calzati & van Loenen, 2023; 2025). These approaches, indeed, share the same concern for fostering digital polities within/through which mechanisms for guaranteeing power distribution across actors, mutual accountability via checks and balances, and forms of collegial decision and control are systemically devised. In fact, Calzati and de Kerckhove already mention the concept of a “quantum republic”; however, this remains at a high level of abstraction.

Here, I refine this idea, identifying and discussing interdependent sets of principles, bodies, and processes characterising a quantum republic governance model.