Microsoft's Quantum Chief Refuses to Share Data Behind Majorana Particle Claims

Microsoft's corporate vice president of quantum, Zulfi Alam, has a message for the scientists who doubt his team's results: he doesn't care.

Alam told WIRED that he isn't interested in appeasing physicists who've questioned Microsoft's claims about Majorana quasiparticles, a theoretical building block the company is betting on for its quantum computing program. "I don't really care," he said, laughing.

For the head of a multibillion-dollar corporate research effort, that's a notable thing to say out loud.

What Microsoft claimed, and why scientists balked

Last year, Microsoft's quantum team announced it had effectively split an electron into Majorana quasiparticles, a step toward building a new kind of qubit for quantum computers. Majorana particles were first hypothesized nearly 90 years ago and have never been definitively confirmed to exist in this form.

According to WIRED, outside scientists were skeptical of the announcement because Microsoft's data was inconclusive and hadn't gone through peer review. Physicists specifically said they couldn't rule out that other physical phenomena, not Majorana particles, were producing the signals Microsoft pointed to as evidence.

This isn't the company's first stumble here. In 2021, Microsoft retracted a paper from the journal Nature that had claimed evidence of Majorana particles, after independent physicists found problems with the data analysis, per WIRED.

In June, Microsoft said it had built a qubit 1,000 times more reliable than its earlier version, using what it describes as an AI agent for scientific discovery. That claim rests on the same underlying Majorana work that scientists have already questioned. Microsoft has not released the raw data behind it.

"Why should I?"

Asked why Microsoft won't share the granular data scientists want to independently verify the results, Alam's answer was blunt: "Why should I?"

He cited commercial sensitivity as the reason the team can't publicize its data. He also argued the traditional peer-review process is simply too slow for a company moving at Microsoft's pace, noting that the June paper published in Nature described work Microsoft had actually done 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 told WIRED. He added that he doesn't think there are enough qualified experts available to speed up the review process anyway. "That's why this paper thing is kind of boring now," he said.

The strongest case for Microsoft's position

There's a real argument buried in what Alam is saying. Peer review genuinely is slow, and a company racing Google, IBM, and a wave of well-funded startups toward commercially useful quantum computers has legitimate reason to worry that a two-year publication lag means competitors catch up while reviewers deliberate. Protecting proprietary methods from rivals is also a normal, defensible business practice, not evidence of fraud.

But that argument explains why Microsoft might not want to publish everything. It doesn't explain why the company keeps making public claims of scientific breakthroughs, then declining to provide the evidence that would let anyone outside Microsoft confirm those breakthroughs are real.

Those are two different things. A private company is free to keep trade secrets. A private company is not entitled to have its unverified claims treated as established science just because it says so.

What's actually proven versus what's asserted

What's proven: Microsoft published a paper in Nature in June describing a qubit design. What's disputed: whether the underlying physics genuinely demonstrates Majorana quasiparticles, as opposed to other phenomena producing similar signals. What's simply asserted, with no independent way to check it: the 1,000x reliability improvement Microsoft announced.

The 2021 retraction matters here. It's not a hypothetical concern that Microsoft's quantum claims might not hold up. It already happened once, and independent physicists were the ones who caught it, specifically because they had access to the underlying analysis.

WIRED's own framing treats Alam's dismissiveness largely as a personality quirk, a swaggering executive who doesn't sweat critics. Microsoft is a public company. Quantum computing claims move stock narratives, attract government defense interest given the encryption-breaking implications of the technology, and shape how seriously policymakers take the broader quantum race with China. Investors and the public aren't in a position to independently audit Majorana particle physics. Peer review, however slow, is the mechanism that exists for that.

No regulatory body oversees the accuracy of corporate science announcements the way the SEC oversees financial disclosures. That's a gap, not a scandal, but it's the reason a company can say "1,000 times more reliable" and face no immediate consequence if the claim doesn't survive scrutiny.

The unresolved question is straightforward: will Microsoft ever release the raw data, or will the company's quantum computing claims keep arriving exclusively through its own press announcements and hand-picked, delayed journal publications, with the people best equipped to check the work locked out.