Oct 22, 2025

Insider Brief Senior defense leaders and technologists at The City Quantum & AI Summit in London said quantum and artificial intelligence will be decisive in maintaining NATO’s strategic advantage amid rising geopolitical tensions. Panelists including representatives from Multiverse Computing, Aquark Technologies, BAE Systems, and MBDA highlighted how quantum sensing, AI assurance, and collaboration between startups and defense contractors are reshaping deterrence and resilience. Speakers warned that Europe’s quantum ambitions are constrained by funding and regulation, emphasizing the need for faster innovation, stronger public-private partnerships, and sustained defense investment before it is too late. At a time when technology defines national power, senior defense leaders and technologists say quantum and artificial intelligence could prove decisive in maintaining strategic advantage across the NATO alliance. Speaking at The City Quantum & AI Summit’s defense panel discussion chaired by General Sir Patrick Sanders, the high-level defence panel explored how quantum sensing, AI assurance and public-private collaboration are reshaping deterrence and resilience in an increasingly hostile world.The summit, one of the premier summits bringing together Quantum, Defense and the Financial Sector, was celebrating its Fifth Anniversary in London. General Sanders, who led the discussion,  framed the debate with a historical perspective. Drawing on thinkers from Gramsci to Kissinger, he warned that nations and institutions risk “a strange defeat” when they fail to adapt to technological and ideological shifts. He argued that defense organizations must avoid this fate by embracing innovation at speed: To that end, Sanders convened four leaders working at the frontiers of quantum and AI transformation: Enrique Lizaso of Multiverse Computing, Andrei Dragomir of Aquark Technologies, Rob Flanders of BAE Systems, and Edwin Bowden-Peters of MBDA. A Dual Challenge: Competing and Securing Rob Flanders, Head of Threat and Incident Response at BAE Systems, described a defense environment shaped by what he called a “dipolar threat landscape.” He pointed to active conflict on NATO’s borders and long-term strategic competition with China as defining pressures. “So we’re faced with a literal war on the border, combined with a much longer term geostrategic threat that essentially sits behind lots of the technologies that we’re looking at, discussing and adopting today,” said Flanders. “So I think it’s from our perspective, very much a dipolar threat landscape that we need to be aware of and be concerned about.” Flanders said that emerging capabilities like AI-assisted quantum systems demand rigorous assurance before being fielded. “In defense, high assurance isn’t optional,” he added, explaining that engineers must know the provenance of data that trains AI systems. “If you put garbage in, you might well get garbage out – and that’s the last thing you want on a strategic program,” Flanders added. Quantum Sensing and the Return of Deterrence For Andrei Dragomir, founder and CEO of Aquark Technologies, quantum sensing is already transforming how NATO nations approach navigation, timing, and infrastructure resilience. His company, the first quantum investment of the NATO Innovation Fund, builds compact cold-atom clocks and sensors that work in GPS-denied environments. Dragomir said that the key advantage of quantum sensing is its ability to “collect good data rather than bad data” – eliminating noise at the source rather than filtering it afterward. That accuracy, he argued, underpins both deterrence and resilience. “So, having that technology and using it in a proper way can definitely be like the next bow and arrow of defense,” said Dragomir. “It’s also an indirect capability, where if you can navigate in GPS denied environments, eventually your enemy is going to stop spoofing your GPS, because it’s pointless, and therefore you can still rely on the existing infrastructure that you would otherwise have relied on today, and I think it’s going to have a huge impact.” He forecast that deployable quantum navigation systems could begin scaling within 12 to 36 months, emphasizing collaboration as essential to success. “I think it’s collaboration that is absolutely essential at this point in time,” said Dragomir. “There’s no single player that can build towards a vision like this by themselves. We need to have our doors very, very open.” Europe’s Quantum Investment Gap Enrique Lizaso, CEO and co-founder of Multiverse Computing, offered a candid view of Europe’s position in the quantum race. His firm develops hybrid quantum-AI algorithms for banks, defense manufacturers, and governments. Lizaso argued that Europe’s problem is not talent or ideas, but financing and regulation. “We have the technology, maybe even better,” said Lizaso, adding, “But the way to convert – to transform – that into something which is more than that, by which I mean create companies that are big enough – is a different way. This is a financial problem at the very, very, very core of the situation, particularly in Europe.” He also pointed to new defense applications of AI model compression, including lightweight multimodal neural networks that can run on small devices and recognize objects in the field. However, he warned that overly restrictive data-use rules could delay such innovations. Bridging the Gap Between Labs and Battlefields Edwin Bowden-Peters, UK Technology Watch Lead at MBDA, underscored how innovation is accelerating beyond traditional defense boundaries. “Access to technology has been completely democratized,” he said, noting that tools once confined to military labs are now commonplace in consumer electronics. MBDA, which has invested directly in Aquark, is testing new models of collaboration with startups. Bowden-Peters recalled that Aquark caught his team’s attention when they demonstrated a ruggedized quantum device that could be carried rather than confined to a lab bench. “They cared about it being ruggedized and real world and so immediately we knew that they cared about the same things as us,” Bowden-Peters said. “And so then what we did is we funded an experiment, and we said, can we push this further?” He added that defense must increase its risk appetite for performance — but never at the expense of safety. “If you come second in war, someone doesn’t go home,” he said. “That’s why we have to test to extremes.” Investing Before It’s Too Late General Sanders closed with a reminder that defense spending is not an indulgence but an insurance policy. In 1936, he noted, the U.K. spent 2.9% of GDP on defense; by 1939, that figure had risen to 10%, and by 1945, to 50%. “The sums we’re talking about today  – half a percent, one percent of GDP  – are nothing,” he said. “Prevention is a hell of a lot cheaper than cure.”