For the last two decades, GPS technology has become inextricably integrated into society: from smartphones to airplanes, the stock market to emergency hotline operators, and even our power grids. But the system that underpins so many aspects of modern infrastructure is more vulnerable than most people realize — and conflict around the world has allowed bad actors to take advantage of it.
GPS jamming and spoofing—where signals are either blocked or mimicked to deceive receivers — have emerged as growing threats in recent years. In 2024 alone, over 1,000 commercial flights per day were affected by GPS spoofing, especially while flying through regions like the Middle East and Eastern Europe. During these incidents, in-flight instruments show pilots that their aircraft is flying higher or lower than they truly are or that they are miles off of their actual location. In maritime settings, spoofed GPS signals have even caused ships to veer off course or run aground. These are not isolated glitches, but the result of deliberate electronic warfare tactics.
The good news: quantum technologies may offer a new solution — and several prototypes are already being tested. Several CQE corporate partners, including Boeing, Infleqtion, and SandboxAQ, are among those developing applications.
“Governments and the commercial industry are in dire need of this technology,” said Ken Devine, senior product manager for quantum navigation at SandboxAQ. “The geopolitical issues happening across the world, and the ramp up in both jamming and spoofing — Russia, Ukraine, the Middle East, Israel, Iran — everyone's getting super disruptive, and that's not going to go away anytime soon. Everyone is saying, ‘We basically need this yesterday.’”
One alternative that’s gaining traction is quantum navigation, a suite of sensor-based techniques that do not rely on satellite signals. In May 2023, SandboxAQ completed the first of many flight tests for the US Air Force and its commercial aviation partners, including two major USAF exercises that year. In 2024, Boeing completed the world’s first recorded flight using multiple quantum navigation systems, testing the ability of these sensors to navigate across the central United States for four hours without GPS. That test incorporated two different technologies: a magnetic field-based navigation system called AQNav from SandboxAQ and an inertial navigation system from quantum sensing technology company AOSense.
“The power of quantum navigation is not just that it vastly improves existing inertial navigation systems,” said Caitlin Carnahan, vice president for quantum software at Infleqtion, which is also developing quantum navigation technology. “It’s more that it represents a new tool, a new angle from which to approach the problem of navigation that can reduce reliance on GPS and overcome issues like spoofing and jamming.”
New Tools
There are many ways for someone to measure where they’ve been and where they’re going. For millennia, human cultures have oriented themselves by fixed points such as stars or mountains. This is essentially how GPS satellites provide navigation; they may be in constant motion, but the motion is known and predictable to such a precise degree that it doesn’t matter.
Instead of using known points, navigation can be done using an accurate map of the terrain: the navigator orients themselves by recognizing the pattern of changes in elevation along the path they take. Alternatively, one can also keep careful track of where and when they’ve changed course since their starting point, and by how much, to derive their location relative to where they started.
These last two — map matching and inertial navigation — are the navigation techniques used by quantum navigation technology. SandboxAQ uses map matching, though the map that they use is of the Earth’s crustal magnetic field rather than terrain, and AOSense’s technology uses inertial navigation. Infleqtion is investigating both modalities.
The Boeing flight used both quantum navigation technologies — from SandboxAQ and AOSense — even though they were very different.
“I want to be able to look at multiple layers of configurations,” said Jay Lowell, principal senior technical fellow at Boeing and a speaker at the 2025 Chicago Quantum Summit in November. “I want to be able to think about whether and how these different quantum technologies interact with each other. Maybe that means a tradeoff of performance between sensors in moments where one struggles and the other’s strong; fundamentally it means we just need to understand whether their combined data is better than either one alone.”
Detecting tiny changes
Magnetic navigation (MagNav) works much like terrain-following radar: it compares real-time sensor data to a known map to pinpoint location. But instead of elevation, the aircraft senses subtle magnetic fluctuations in the Earth’s crust — variations caused by geology, mineral deposits, and even human infrastructure — and compares its measurements to a corresponding map of that field. Scientists believe that birds can use their ability to sense the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate in a similar way. Magnetic field maps of the globe are frequently done for mineral, oil, and gas surveys, as small anomalies in the field can indicate resources underground. But there are areas where high-resolution maps can be hard to come by.
“Map quality in the region you’re going to is definitely a factor that gets plugged into how well magnetic navigation can perform,” Devine said. “It also depends on what type of platform the technology is going to be used — is it a large military aircraft, a small drone, a commercial passenger aircraft? Is it flying at high or low altitude, or going fighter jet speeds? There are these different pillars that you have to really understand to be able to say, what is the value that MagNav brings to the platform? What does the end user require MagNav to do within that platform?”
Alternatively, inertial navigation depends on accelerometers and gyroscopes — which measure acceleration and rotation, respectively — to measure movement. An inertial sensor tracks how an object moves from a known starting point by recording changes in its speed and direction.
While basic accelerometers are common in smartphones and fitness trackers, quantum inertial sensors can detect changes in motion down to the femtometer—less than the width of an atom—making them extraordinarily precise. Inertial sensors have particular applications in space-based technology, since they do not need maps or fixed points to navigate.
Infleqtion recently completed commercial flight trials of inertial-based quantum navigation in the United Kingdom, and plans to conduct tests in the US as well. Infleqtion’s Chicago office is also developing “SAPIENT: Secured AI for PositionIng at the Edge, Navigation, and Timing,” which was the first-place winner in the US Army's xTechScalable AI competition.
“[SAPIENT] is focusing on the software side, taking the outputs of multiple kinds of sensors and stitching them all together with AI to provide a more robust navigation signal,” said Pranav Gokhale, general manager of computing at Infleqtion. “There is a big gap between an inertial measurement unit and a full inertial navigation system, one that takes into account computer vision, magnetometry readings, altimeter readings, etc., so we’re using AI to fill that gap.”
A Noisy Environment
For quantum navigation, the largest challenge by far is the acoustic and electromagnetic chaos that is a modern airplane. The advantage of quantum sensors is that they are so extraordinarily sensitive — but maintaining that measurement advantage while putting these fragile sensors in a vibrating, five-ton aluminum tube full of EM-emitting electronics at 30,000 feet in the air is a colossal noise mitigation challenge.
The interior of the plane can be mapped with an "electromagnetic sniffer" to detect the EM fields emitted by the plane's various electronics. SandboxAQ also uses an advanced AI algorithm for filtering noise, which helps isolate the pure magnetic signal. The combination of AI and quantum technologies enables SandboxAQ’s technology to exceed the Required Navigation Performance standards for commercial aviation.
“We’ve validated that we can do real-time navigation with this technology,” said Devine. “And that’s huge, because the need for it is only going to increase.”