China is quietly making quantum computing advances and may be poised to surpass American tech development, according to U.S. intelligence community veteran Denis Mandich, now the chief technology officer at Qrypt. He told lawmakers this week that the world is “likely going to experience a DeepSeek moment in quantum computing” where those outside China will suddenly become aware of its tech prowess.

The emergence of a powerful artificial intelligence model from China’s DeepSeek caught some national security professionals off guard earlier this year and briefly panicked the stock market. National security professionals are preoccupied with the potential arrival of a cryptanalytically relevant quantum computer, a theoretical machine poised to eliminate the encryption securing financial systems and state secrets. 

Mr. Mandich testified to Congress that Chinese intellectual property theft is enabling the growth of its quantum industry. “They have access to everything that we’ve ever done in all of our companies; all of our companies have been penetrated, as far as we know, many of their employees are in China,” he said. “In many cases, those employees actually physically work from remote locations in Chinese intelligence agencies, not even in the private sector.”

A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers wants new policy to stop U.S. agencies from acquiring or using artificial intelligence made by the Chinese Communist Party or other foreign adversaries. The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership is pushing the No Adversarial AI Act and said Wednesday they have the support of Sens. Rick Scott, Florida Republican, and Gary Peters, Michigan Democrat.

Rep. John Moolenaar, the committee chairman, says AI is at the center of a new Cold War with China and the U.S. must stop CCP theft and subversion. “From IP theft and chip smuggling to embedding AI in surveillance and military platforms, the Chinese Communist Party is racing to weaponize this technology,” the Michigan Republican said in a statement. “We must draw a clear line: U.S. government systems cannot be powered by tools built to serve authoritarian interests.”

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, the House CCP Committee’s top-ranking Democrat, has co-sponsored the legislation to help establish a firewall between foreign adversaries’ AI and American-developed tools. He is also working on separate legislation to govern yet-to-emerge artificial general intelligence, which performs at least as well as humans across all cognitive domains.

Communist China is expected to step up intelligence analysis of Mr. Trump and of U.S. military strike capabilities after the Pentagon’s dispatch of B-2 bombers to Guam in a deception operation designed to keep the secrecy of the U.S. strikes on Iran.

“Xi Jinping is now demanding his intelligence services provide a whole new assessment of Donald Trump’s statements on nuclear weapons from the Trump 45 administration and even before,” says former State Department China hand John Tkacik. Increased intelligence collection by China’s Ministry of State Security likely would include questioning North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for new details of his past exchanges with Mr. Trump during meetings in Singapore in 2018 and Hanoi in 2019.

Beijing would also want to know if Mr. Trump has a sophisticated grasp of strike weaponry. Mr. Tkacik says China also would try to determine if the U.S. under Mr. Trump has updated the use of B-2s in the single integrated operational plan, or SIOP, the predetermined nuclear war plan for China.

The Iran-linked “Homeland Justice” hacking group has taken credit for a digital disruption in Albania, which the hackers say was targeted because it hosted exiled opponents of the Islamic Republic, the Mujahedin-e Khalq, known as MEK. Local media reports have confirmed the cyberattack, which hit websites and took data from Albania’s capital, Tirana.

U.S. cyber officials previously branded Homeland Justice as “Iranian state cyber actors” in the aftermath of a 2022 attack on Albania’s government. The hackers’ most recently hit Albania before the June 22 U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. The cyberattack could be a harbinger of things to come, and the West is preparing.

Cyber intelligence firms warn the U.S. should be on guard for intrusions aimed at the energy, telecom, aerospace, water and financial sectors and that Americans should anticipate distributed denial of service attacks on other efforts to take down digital services. The U.S. intelligence community has also assessed that Iranian cyberattackers pose a threat to Americans. However, some have cast doubt. Before the U.S. airstrikes, skeptics told online publication SpyTalk that Iran’s cyber prowess does not match China or Russia’s digital armies.

The front line of American security “doesn’t start at our borders,” writes Norm Coleman, a former Republican senator from Minnesota, who argues that “it begins in the places where American influence can prevent the next crisis from spiraling out of control.”

“That’s why I’m deeply concerned about the rescissions package being considered by Congress,” Mr. Coleman writes. “At a time when our rivals — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea — are doubling down to threaten our citizens and undermine our interests around the world, this proposal would undermine the very tools America needs to compete and win on the global stage.

“I am deeply proud of the work that President Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the entire administration have done to rid our nation’s foreign assistance programs of unnecessary waste, fraud and abuse,” he writes. “It was long overdue, but we can’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. These are resources for critical U.S. national security, global health and humanitarian programs that make our nation safer, stronger and more prosperous.”

• June 26 — The Illegals: A Conversation With Shaun Walker on the Untold Story of Russia’s Deep-Cover Spies, Carnegie Endowment

• June 26 — The Future of NATO Defense, Resilience and Allied Innovation, Center for Strategic & International Studies

• June 26 — The Realities of an Invasion of Taiwan, Stimson Center

• June 30 — Bolstering the Transatlantic Partnership at a Global Inflection Point, Atlantic Council

• July 10 — Federal IT Efficiency Summit, GovCIO

• July 13-17 — GenAI Summit, GenAI Week

• July 15-18 — Aspen Security Forum, Aspen Institute