White House Hosts Quantum Summit as Executive Orders Push for American Lead
President Donald Trump’s science office convened the White House Summit on American Quantum Innovation on July 7, 2026, where government officials and quantum computing executives assembled two weeks after Trump signed a couple of executive orders aimed at cementing U.S. leadership in the field.
One of the attendees wasPsiQuantum CEO Victor Peng, according to a July 7 post from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (@WHOSTP47). Michael Kratsios, the OSTP director, delivered opening remarks. In prepared remarks published by the office, Kratsios tied the gathering directly to the two executive orders Trump signed in late June, after bidding everyone a welcome:
“Good morning, and welcome to the White House Summit on American Quantum Innovation.”
Indeed, the summit signals where Washington’s attention is going. Specifically, quantum computing has spent years as a research curiosity, the kind of thing that gets a paragraph in a science magazine and then disappears. Now it’s a White House event with a CEO guest list.
How the White House is framing quantum computing
The OSTP framed the day around what it called urgency, the worry that other countries could pull ahead on a technology that could break current encryption and reshape drug discovery, materials science, and financial modeling. China has poured state money into quantum research for years, and Washington noticed.
Peng’s presence is important, as PsiQuantum is building a photonic quantum computer, a different bet from the superconducting approach that IBM and Google have pushed. The company has announced plans for large-scale machines and secured government and commercial backing to get there. Having its CEO in the room puts a specific technical wager next to the policy talk.
What the executive orders could mean for U.S. quantum policy
Meanwhile, the two executive orders themselves haven’t been fully detailed in the summit coverage. But what’s certainly clear is the timing. Trump signed them, then the OSTP built an event around them within a fortnight, a pace that suggests the administration wants the quantum push to read as a priority.
As a reminder, the U.S. passed the National Quantum Initiative Act in 2018, which set up federal research centers and funding streams under the first Trump administration. That law came up for reauthorization debates in the years since, and lawmakers have argued over how much federal money should flow to a technology that still hasn’t delivered a commercially useful machine at scale. The summit lands in that context, as an attempt to keep the momentum going and the industry close.
Whether the executive orders come with new appropriations or mostly signal intent will determine how much this changes. My read: watch the funding. Summits come cheap, but fabrication plants and error-corrected qubits do not.