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- A Right to AI, Quantum Murmurs, Fusion Finances, and Quantum Cryptography
A Right to AI, Quantum Murmurs, Fusion Finances, and Quantum Cryptography
This week’s science bits from SWTG
Marcus Gee-Lim
April 15, 2026
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OpenAI Proposes “Right to AI”
Researchers from OpenAI have put forward an industrial policy for artificial intelligence and it’s quite a read. They propose a legally recognised “Right to AI,” meaning broad public access to powerful systems, backed by government-funded compute resources so that researchers, startups, and public institutions can run models themselves, rather than rely on a few companies.
To make this reality, they want to see an expansion of electricity supply for data centres by fast-tracking nuclear and renewables. They also suggest a national wealth fund that captures a share of AI-driven profits and redistributes it to citizens, alongside taxes or levies on highly automated systems, effectively a “robot tax”.
Of course none of that has any chance of happening, but OpenAI can now claim they care about the common man.
This week’s episode of Science News is about quantum computers. Progress in quantum computing as an industry has been relatively stagnant for a while now. But over the past few weeks, that’s changed. Multiple groups focused on quantum cryptography (using quantum computers to break previously-unbreakable encryption protocols) published breakthrough papers in their field, raising concerns that quantum computers could break the crypto industry sooner than we thought. Let’s take a look.
Which Quantum Tech Did the US Military Use to Find the Missing Soldier?
Last week, a report by the New York Post triggered online speculation after claiming that a missing US weapons systems officer, rescued in Iran in April 2026, was located using a “long-range quantum magnetometer.” The devices, dubbed “Ghost Murmur,” can supposedly detect the electromagnetic signal of a human heartbeat from kilometers away.
Unfortunately, physics does not support this claim. While quantum magnetometers exist and are indeed able to detect very weak magnetic fields, they are sensitive to the human heart’s field at centimetre distances in the best case. Quantum “ghost imaging” is a thing, but it requires a source with entangled photons and a specialized detector, a feat that currently requires a controlled laboratory and, again, works across centimetre distances at best. It is also possible to detect the infrared signal of a human heartbeat, and AI-powered analysis certainly helps, but again, the signal is extremely weak and the current technological standard allows it from a few meters away, at best.
Even granting that the US military has some classified tech that outperforms published lab demos, I very strongly doubt they have technology that is orders of magnitude better.
A more plausible explanation is that the rescue relied on advanced infrared sensing using what’s called Type-II Superlattice detectors. These are made by stacking hundreds of ultra-thin layers of different semiconductor materials in a precise “sandwich” structure – they are super sensitive to heat signals. Such devices might indeed be able to spot a human in a cold desert night from kilometers away.
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US Government Both Cuts and Boosts Nuclear Fusion Funding
The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) of the US Department of Energy (DOE) is investing a record $135 million into nuclear fusion tech over the coming 18 months. At the same time, though, the Trump administration is cutting funding to the DOE, which will reduce their nuclear fusion program by about $50 million, according to Andrew Holland, the head of the Fusion Industry Association (via Axios). Makes about as much sense as everything else that’s come out of the Trump administration. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
