Control-Plane Openness in Near-Term Quantum Computing: A Survey of Vendor Stacks and Field Implications
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Quantum Physics arXiv:2605.15233 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 13 May 2026] Title:Control-Plane Openness in Near-Term Quantum Computing: A Survey of Vendor Stacks and Field Implications Authors:Rylan Malarchick View a PDF of the paper titled Control-Plane Openness in Near-Term Quantum Computing: A Survey of Vendor Stacks and Field Implications, by Rylan Malarchick View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Public access to pulse-level and control-electronics interfaces in commercial quantum computing has bifurcated. The largest superconducting cloud platforms have closed access at this layer, with IBM removing pulse-level control from all production QPUs in February 2025; mid-tier superconducting vendors and the more open neutral-atom platforms have moved in the opposite direction. We survey thirteen commercial vendors across superconducting, trapped-ion, neutral-atom, and photonic modalities, grading each on six axes of openness at what we call the control plane: the layer between gate-level circuit specification and physical control electronics. The catalog ships as a separate machine-readable artifact under CC-BY-4.0 (DOI: this https URL). The bifurcation is documented row by row, with implications for reproducibility, hardware-aware research, and cross-vendor benchmarking. We do not propose an architecture or a reference implementation; we describe what the field has lost as the access landscape has shifted, and what minimally open access at this layer would have to look like. Comments: Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Emerging Technologies (cs.ET) Cite as: arXiv:2605.15233 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2605.15233v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.15233 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Submission history From: Rylan Malarchick [view email] [v1] Wed, 13 May 2026 18:15:15 UTC (88 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Control-Plane Openness in Near-Term Quantum Computing: A Survey of Vendor Stacks and Field Implications, by Rylan MalarchickView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.ET References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)