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Insider Brief
- The AI Lab has made its Trust Identity Protocol (TIP) publicly available as a post-quantum system for verifying content authorship, identity and whether digital works have been altered.
- The company argues that advances in quantum computing and AI have shortened the preparation window for post-quantum cryptography, citing estimates ranging from about 20 years to roughly two years.
- TIP uses ML-DSA-65 signatures, SHAKE-256 content fingerprints and a decentralized ledger to create a permanent record of a work’s creator and modification status, while stating that it does not establish whether the content itself is true.
PRESS RELEASE — Journalists, authors, filmmakers, and other creators can now prove that their work is theirs, and that it has not been changed, with a tag built for the post- quantum era and recorded on an immutable, decentralized distributed ledger. The AI Lab (theailab.org) today made the Trust Identity Protocol (TIP) available to the public, saying that AI has cut the time the world has to prepare for quantum computing from about 20 years to about two.
The quantum clock is moving faster than expected, and artificial intelligence is one reason why. In 2019, researchers estimated that breaking RSA-2048, the encryption behind much of the world’s digital trust, would take a quantum computer with about 20 million qubits. In May 2025, a Google Quantum AI researcher cut that estimate to fewer than one million. In February 2026, a new design known as the Pinnacle Architecture put it under 100,000 physical qubits, under specific engineering assumptions. In March 2026, Google set 2029 as its own deadline to move to post-quantum cryptography, and named digital signatures a priority.
TIP is a post-quantum standard that lets people protect what belongs to them: their ideas, creations, essays, books, music, and movies. TIP gives any piece of digital content a TIP, a permanent tag signed by the person who created the work. Each TIP records who made it, the creator’s own declaration of whether a person, AI, or both made it, and whether anyone has changed it since. TIP is available now through a browser extension and web app. For a reporter, that means a published story carries proof of who wrote it and whether anyone has altered it, so readers and other newsrooms can check the original before they share or cite it.
“Trust is no longer a default. It has to be signed. Content without a CTID is content no one stands behind, and readers have every right to ignore it.”
— Dr. Sofia Martinez, Chief Executive Officer and President of The AI Lab
“Ten years ago, people in my field talked about the quantum threat as 20 years away,” said Dinesh Mendhe, Founder and Chairman of The AI Lab and inventor of TIP. “With AI accelerating quantum research, I believe we now have roughly two years to prepare. That is why TIP is available today. When the locks change, everything signed with the old locks becomes questionable, including proof of who wrote a book, filmed a scene, or had an idea first. Humans need to protect what belongs to them now, with signatures built for AI, superintelligence, and the quantum era.”
Why The Quantum Timeline Is Shrinking
Three forces are compressing the timeline. Quantum hardware keeps improving. Error correction, the hardest engineering problem in quantum computing, keeps getting more efficient. AI is accelerating both. Google Quantum AI and Google DeepMind have used AI to improve quantum error correction, including the AlphaQubit system unveiled in 2024, and AI tools are now used to design circuits, calibrate machines, and discover better qubit materials. IBM researchers have also published work examining how advances in quantum computing and AI may affect post-quantum migration timelines.
Expert surveys reflect the shift. The Global Risk Institute’s Quantum Threat Timeline Report 2025 found that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer is quite possible within 10 years, with an estimated likelihood of 28 to 49 percent. Industry has begun acting on shorter horizons. Google’s 2029 timeline covers both encryption and digital signatures, and Cloudflare has also accelerated its post-quantum readiness deadline to 2029, according to Cointelegraph.
Governments are setting deadlines too. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published its first post-quantum standards in August 2024, including FIPS 204 for digital signatures. NIST’s draft transition guidance proposes deprecating quantum-vulnerable algorithms such as RSA-2048 after 2030 and disallowing them after 2035.
Why Creators Should Care
Most discussion of the quantum threat centers on banks, governments, and stolen data. The AI Lab says proof of authorship is a quieter risk underneath them. Digital signatures are how the internet proves who said, made, or approved something. If those signatures can be forged, a future quantum computer could be used to fake a record of who wrote an essay, composed a song, or filed an idea first, or to cast doubt on a real one.
That risk arrives alongside four problems AI has already made worse. Fake content now looks real, and the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2026 ranks misinformation and disinformation as the second most severe global risk over the next two years. Work is copied, altered, and reposted under someone else’s name. Original ideas are taken before a patent or trademark can be filed. And creators lose income when audiences watch the copy instead of the original.
“Every essay, every book, every film is a piece of someone’s life,” said Dr. Sofia Martinez, Chief Executive Officer and President of The AI Lab. “People should not have to wonder whether proof of their work will still hold in five years. TIP is built so that it will. Tip it only if you mean it.” Built for the post-quantum era from day one
TIP was designed around NIST’s post-quantum standards rather than retrofitted to them. Every TIP signature uses ML-DSA-65, defined in FIPS 204. Content is fingerprinted with SHAKE-256 from the SHA-3 family, defined in FIPS 202, so changing even one word breaks the match. Signing keys are stored encrypted on the user’s device and unlocked with a face or fingerprint scan through the W3C WebAuthn passkey standard. Each TIP is recorded on a decentralized distributed ledger, making the record immutable. Once written, it can’t be edited or erased, and there is no single point to attack.
Each tipped work becomes a Verifiable Asset, carrying a CTID (Content TIP ID): a permanent, signed public record of who made it, when, how it was made, and a fingerprint showing whether it has changed. Anyone can tap the TIP badge to check it.
TIP is careful about what it promises. It proves where content came from, not whether it is true. The label is the creator’s own declaration, tied to a verified identity, so a false claim stays on the permanent record under that person’s name. Anyone who believes a label is wrong can dispute it, and a jury of verified people decides. TIP does not replace a patent, trademark, or copyright filing. It provides a dated, checkable record of who made something, which The AI Lab says is the evidence creators have lacked.
What TIP Protects
For authors and essayists, TIP keeps a writer’s name attached to every edition and excerpt. For filmmakers and studios, it lets fans find the official trailer instead of the copies that flood video platforms within hours. In June 2026, SAG-AFTRA members ratified, by 91.42 percent, a new TV/Theatrical Agreement that expands protections around digital replicas and AI-generated performers. The AI Lab believes TIP can complement such agreements by making real human performance visible. For musicians, researchers, inventors, and journalists, TIP creates a dated record of who made the work and when.
Businesses can put a TIP on everything they publish and disclose which content used AI. Rooverse (rooverse.app) is the first social media platform to adopt TIP, Apex Modular Solutions (ApexModulars.com) the first business website, and Iffel International’s One Brain the first planned CRM integration. Public agencies can give citizens a checkable record of where official information came from. With the European Union AI Act’s transparency obligations applying from August 2, 2026, TIP is designed to align with the growing demand for disclosure of how content was made.
A Humanitarian Mission
The AI Lab’s mission is to help people keep ownership of their work. The company treats TIP as a humanitarian cause as much as a product, and says proof of authorship should not depend on wealth, geography, or the size of a legal team. Great libraries of the past, from Alexandria to Nalanda, were lost to fire. The AI Lab argues that today’s record of human knowledge faces a different threat: being copied, altered, and forged until no one can tell the original from the imitation.
“No one can tell you the exact year a quantum computer will break today’s signatures,” said Mendhe. “But Google, NIST, and the people who set global standards have stopped waiting, and so have we. The record of who made what in our century should not depend on locks we already know will fail.”