Two papers published days apart have reduced the estimated physical qubit count needed to break widely deployed public-key cryptography by roughly two orders of magnitude — from around one million to as few as ten thousand. Together, they compress the timeline for quantum threats to cryptography from "decades away" to "measurable in engineering milestones." The Google paper also introduces the first use of zero-knowledge proofs as a responsible disclosure mechanism for novel cryptanalytic results, proving the existence of optimized attack circuits without publishing them.
