Microsoft quantum chief dismisses skeptics: 'I don't really care'

Microsoft’s quantum chief, Zulfi Alam, dismissed scientific doubts about his team’s Majorana particle research in an interview with WIRED on August 6, 2026, saying flatly: “I don’t really care.”

Controversy is not new. In 2021, Microsoft retracted a Nature paper on Majorana particles after independent physicists found flaws in the data analysis. In 2025, the company claimed to have created the elusive quasiparticles, and in June 2026 it announced a qubit 1,000 times more reliable than its predecessor, built with an AI agent. Yet the underlying Majorana work remains disputed.

Alam contends that sharing granular data would compromise commercial secrets, and he dismisses peer review as too slow. He pointed to a Nature paper published in June 2026 that was based on work from two years earlier. “The world has changed in two years, so this notion of having peer reviews and publications doesn’t work in this fast-moving world right now,” Alam said. He called the traditional process “boring.”

Trevor Lanting, chief development officer at D-Wave Quantum, rejected that stance. External experts can reliably assess claims, Lanting said, and dodging scrutiny suggests “our results aren’t strong enough to stand up to that scrutiny.”

Alam remains unmoved. The skepticism “motivates us to be even faster,” he said, because the mission is to let the machine prove itself. Microsoft has set a goal of building a useful quantum computer by 2029.