Among the many problems with the article was its failure to link to the paper—reportedly published in September in the Chinese-language academic publication Chinese Journal of Computers—at all. Citing Wang, the paper said that the paper wasn’t being published for the time being “due to the sensitivity of the topic.” Since then, the South China Morning Post article has been quietly revised to remove the “military-grade encryption” reference.

The paper makes no reference to AES or RSA and never claims to break anything. Instead, it describes a way to use D-Wave-enabled quantum annealing to find the integral distinguisher. Classical attacks have had the optimized capability to find the same integral distinguishers for years. David Jao, a professor specializing in PQC at the University of Waterloo in Canada, likened the research to finding a new lock-picking technique. The end result is the same, but the method is new.