Celebrity gossip might break the Internet, but not in the way that quantum computers could. “The advent of quantum computers poses a critical threat, as they could break widely deployed encryption schemes,” warns Lily Chen, a cryptography expert from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Systems at risk include banking encryption, digital signatures, secure messaging, secure shell tunnelling, cryptocurrency and more. Today’s quantum computers are still too small and error-prone to defeat gold-standard encryption. However, new results from Google Quantum AI and start-up Oratomic suggest that could change, with two widely-used cryptographic systems – elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) algorithm – potentially coming under threat sooner than many scientists predicted. Space-time trade-off At present, anyone who wants to access encrypted information needs a secret digital key. To obtain this key, an attacker must first solve a difficult mathematics problem. For example, breaking the RSA algorithm boils down to factoring a large number into its prime components. Breaking ECC involves finding a secret number that connects two points on an elliptic curve. Classical computers might take billions of years to solve these problems. But if an attacker had access to a powerful enough quantum computer, they could solve the problems in mere minutes using an algorithm devised by Peter Shor in 1994. Several years ago, experts estimated that cracking a typical RSA scheme with 2048-bit keys (RSA-2048) would require tens of millions of physical quantum bits (qubits), which are the building blocks of quantum computers. A year ago, this value dropped to a million. By February 2026, it was down to 100,000. The latest results from California-based Oratomic push the floor even lower, to 10,000 physical qubits. The largest neutral-atom qubit array – realized last year in the lab of Oratomic co-founder Manuel Endres –