Securing quantum error correction against misleading AI advice

The research shows how additional calibration measurements can provide the missing sign information needed for certified recovery updates under uncertainty and drift.

A separate evaluator is proposed that accepts an update only when calibration uncertainty and a justified drift bound certify improvement over the current recovery, without assuming the adviser's correctness.

Simulations demonstrate that calibration-confidence checks can reject harmful proposals while retaining beneficial updates.

Securing quantum error correction against misleading advice from AI agents

Can an attacker turn influence over an artificial intelligence (AI) adviser into a harmful quantum error-correction update? We identify an ambiguity in passive syndrome records that obstructs recovery selection, then show how additional calibration measurements support certified recovery updates under uncertainty and drift. In an odd-distance square toric code with error-free preparation, syndrome measurements, and recovery operations, opposite coherent $X$ rotations produce identical passive syndrome-history distributions. Yet a fixed phase correction can help at one sign and harm at the other. A terminal logical measurement on known encoded calibration states supplies the missing sign information. A separate evaluator accepts an update only when calibration uncertainty and a justified drift bound certify improvement over the current recovery, without assuming that the adviser recommends correctly. In simulated advice attacks, calibration-confidence checks reject harmful proposals while retaining beneficial updates under honest advice. We derive sufficient limits on calibration age that require improvement through deployment. In matched simulations, a validated channel-specific bound retains more beneficial updates than the general bound after accounting for evaluation time, while preventing the tested harmful activations under the stated drift assumption. A separate surface-code experiment includes stochastic circuit faults and noise changing during acquisition. Deterministic controllers achieve at least as many beneficial updates with the same observations. Violating the drift assumption permits harmful acceptance in the toric experiment. The results identify information required for recovery selection, establish conditional guarantees against harmful updates, and quantify the recovery improvements forgone through conservative acceptance.

This report is categorized under AITOP's "Papers" desk, focusing on US frontier AI labs and Silicon Valley technology leaders. Within our cross-regional analytical framework, it directly maps to AI regulation, compliance frameworks, and sovereign compute policy and AI developer toolchains, coding agents, and engineering workflows. Key entities and technical topics under continuous tracking include quantum error correction, AI safety, prompt engineering.

Source attribution: curated from arXiv cs.AI (@A. Barış Özgüler).