Morning Edition · Sunday, October 18, 2026Published at 1:40 AM EDT · New York

Google cuts magic-state errors about 40-fold on its Willow chip, removing one bottleneck on the path to attacks on exposed bitcoin keys

Researchers note that breaking RSA-2048 still needs magic states roughly a million times cleaner, while Aztec has set the end of 2030 as its target for a full post-quantum migration.

Google Quantum AI says a technique called magic state cultivation cut errors about 40-fold on its Willow processor and produced magic states with 99.99% fidelity, in work published in Science. Magic states are single-use resources that a qu…