Machines vastly more powerful than today’s fastest supercomputers would be capable of cracking the codes that protect virtually all modern communication, he told the agency, which is tasked with safeguarding the U.S. military’s communications.

I guess it was inevitable people would hear “new kind of computer that can do some new things” and think “another generation of more powerful computers”, after the latter was such a big deal for so long.

Quantum computers currently would be useless for any commercial problem aside from codebreaking and simulating other quantum systems like chemistry, for reference.

In the meantime, Kunz told the panel, a global effort to plunder data is underway so that intercepted messages can be decoded after Q-day in what he described as “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks, according to a recording of the session the agency later made public.

This has scared the shit out of me for a long time. The threat today isn’t just abstract, we need to get on PQC now.