Microsoft’s quantum breakthrough draws scrutiny

Microsoft’s claims of a topological quantum architecture that paves the way to “solving meaningful, industrial-scale problems in years, not decades” has drawn harsh criticism. The entire project is a fabrication through misrepresentation of sample quality and data cherry-picking and manipulation, University of Pittsburgh researcher Sergey Frolov writes on Bluesky in a post titled “Microsoft is the largest fraud in quantum computing.”

Frolov is one of the scientists who refuted the claim that so-called Majorana particles had been observed, resulting in the retraction of a 2018 high-profile Nature paper authored by Delft University of Technology and Microsoft researcher Leo Kouwenhoven. A series of inquiries eventually found the quantum physicist to have acted “partly culpably negligent” without violating scientific integrity. Kouwenhoven left Microsoft in 2022 and is now a full-time professor in Delft.