ASI Alliance can rebuild Google’s secret quantum circuit, says CEO Ben Goertzel

Dr. Ben Goertzel, CEO of the Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Alliance, told BeInCrypto that his team can recreate the quantum attack circuits that Google Quantum AI built but declined to publish. He warned that if his organization can do it, nation states can too.

Google’s March 30 whitepaper found that two working circuits implementing Shor’s algorithm to break 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography could be built with fewer than 500,000 physical qubits. The team chose not to release the code and instead published a zero-knowledge proof. Goertzel told BeInCrypto that this decision changes nothing.

“Keeping capabilities secret only gives you a very short time frame at best”

Google has interpreted its decision to withhold the circuits as responsible disclosure. The blog post called it a deliberate departure from the team’s historic practice of full transparency, motivated by the potential for abuse.

The crypto industry has largely debated whether this was in line with the founding principle of ‘don’t trust, verify’.

Goertzel did not share the concerns. He told BeInCrypto that the secrecy is functionally irrelevant.

We are confident that we can fix the “secret circuit” that Google has found using our own expertise and reasonable computing power, and if we can do that, surely the Chinese government and other well-resourced actors can too. Keeping abilities secret only gives you a very short period of time at best.

He added that the ASI Alliance has not withheld any of its own code for security reasons, although the team has discussed this internally. His default position is openness.

The security benefits of decentralized research, he argued, outweigh the marginal risk reduction of secrecy when parallel discovery is the norm.

He did leave room for exceptions. If something posed a specific, immediate, short-term threat, the team stopped it.

But according to him, Google’s circuit does not meet that bar, because the knowledge to build it is already widely accessible to capable actors.

The 41% problem

Google’s whitepaper models what it calls an “on-spend attack.” A quantum computer could prepare some of the calculation in advance and then crack a Bitcoin ($BTC) transaction in about nine minutes once the public key is made public.

Since Bitcoin’s average block confirmation takes 10 minutes, the attacker has about a 41% chance of finishing first.

The newspaper also estimates that it is about 6.9 million $BTC are already held in wallets whose public keys have been exposed in some form.

That includes about 1.7 million coins from the network’s early years, as well as additional funds affected by address reuse and Bitcoin’s Taproot upgrade, which makes public keys visible by default.

Goertzel told BeInCrypto that a 41% attack rate is not borderline risk. It is a structural failure.

Any success rate above single digits is highly problematic for a store of value chain. Once rational actors believe that there is a meaningful probability that a transaction can be reversed or that an address can be deleted during the confirmation period, the game-theoretic guarantees underlying Bitcoin’s security model collapse. With 41% you are well over the threshold.

He noted that the hardware to carry out such an attack does not yet exist. But the mathematical proof is complete and Google has set a 2029 deadline for the industry to migrate to post-quantum cryptography (PQC).

Bitcoin currently has no coordinated roadmap for upgrades to meet that deadline.

ASI Alliance says it was built for this

While much of the industry debated the implications, Goertzel told BeInCrypto that his team saw this coming years ago.

He has previously predicted that human-level artificial general intelligence (AGI) could arrive around 2027 or 2028.

Google’s quantum timeline puts both breakthroughs on a collision course, and Goertzel said the ASI Alliance has designed its infrastructure precisely for that convergence.

The convergence of AGI and quantum computing is very real, but to label this purely as a ‘threat’ is to miss the other half of the picture. At the ASI Alliance, we designed ASI:Chain from the ground up to be quantum-centric – not just quantum-resistant, but also quantum-using…So for us, quantum computing alongside AGI is a feature, not a bug.

ASI:Chain, the layer 1 blockchain being developed by the Alliance, uses MeTTa as its smart contract language instead of Solidity.

According to Goertzel, MeTTa includes quantum-type systems, and the team has developed quantum versions of key Hyperon AGI algorithms covering attention allocation, probabilistic logic and evolutionary learning.

The encryption layer is modular. Quantum-safe cryptographic primitives, including lattice- and hash-based schemes, can be connected without redesigning the chain or requiring a hard fork.

The costs consist of computational overhead, which Goertzel called a real technical challenge, but not an architectural challenge.

The Artificial Super Intelligence Alliance ($FET) was formed by a symbolic merger of SingularityNET, Fetch.ai, Ocean Protocol and CUDOS.

Ocean Protocol later left the merger, a move that later sparked legal action amid allegations of token theft.

His sign, $FETis currently trading at around $0.241, up over 5% in the last 24 hours.

“A catastrophic precedent for digital property rights”

Google’s whitepaper highlighted around 1.7 million $BTC in Satoshi-era Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK) wallets that permanently release their public keys.

These coins cannot be migrated. Their owners have disappeared or are unreachable. The article proposed a “digital salvage” framework that could give governments legal authority to quantum crack dormant coins.

Goertzel rejected the premise.

Basically, not allowing governments a legal route to crack private wallets sets a catastrophic precedent for digital property rights. The entire value proposition of crypto rests on the idea that your keys are your coins. Once you’ve established that a sufficiently powerful actor can legally seize coins whose owners are absent, you’ve undermined the foundation.

He acknowledged that those coins will eventually be cracked by someone. The question is whether a legal framework will regulate the process or whether it will become a free-for-all. He tends to leave dormant coins untouched on principle, with the ecosystem taking their eventual vulnerability into account.

Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) offered a different view, suggesting that if Satoshi’s coins don’t move within a certain period of time, the community could consider locking or burning those addresses before hackers can reach them.

He added that identifying all of Satoshi’s addresses without confusing them with early holders would be a challenge in itself.

The race has already started

Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya called Google’s article “quite reasonable” and urged the crypto community to organize a roadmap for quantum resistance within the next few years.

CZ said crypto would survive the quantum age, but warned that coordinating upgrades between decentralized networks would lead to debates, forks and possibly new security bugs.

Goertzel’s position is more blunt. He told BeInCrypto that the projects that survive will be those that started developing quantum years ago. Those who start after the first coins are cracked will not make it.

Against this backdrop, his advice for retailers is practical. Move assets to addresses using the latest key formats available.

For Bitcoin, this means native SegWit (bech32) addresses where the public key remains hidden until it is spent. Avoid reusing addresses. For Ethereum (ETH), the vulnerability is more structural and the options at the individual level remain limited.

When asked whether the quantum threat completely negates the decentralization thesis, Goertzel told BeInCrypto that this is not the case.

But it raises the stakes immensely. If a centralized actor cracks dormant Bitcoin and seizes hundreds of billions in assets, it becomes a massive centralizing force. However, the thesis never assumed eternal cryptography.

The decentralization thesis survives if decentralized projects outpace centralized projects in the quantum transition field. That’s exactly what we plan to do.

Google’s paper, combined with a separate Caltech and Oratomic study showing that Shor’s algorithm can be run at the cryptographic scale with 10,000 qubits, suggests that the preparation time is shorter than often thought.

Goertzel claims his team is already on the other side of that window. The rest of the industry is now trying to catch up.