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The Quantum Intelligence Network

Hardware reliability, queue behaviour, and real costs are things every quantum team rediscovers alone. The Quantum Intelligence Network is an optional, privacy-preserving way to pool anonymous engineering metadata so that Qontinuum's recommendations get better for everyone — without anyone sharing circuits, results, or identity.

It is off by default. Qontinuum is fully functional offline forever; the network only ever adds signal when you opt in.

Design at a glance

  qont run (hardware)
        │  (only if you opted in)
        ▼
  scrub ──► allowlist-only TelemetryRecord ──► local outbox (.qontinuum/telemetry)
        │                                            │
        │                                            │  qont telemetry sync
        ▼                                            ▼
  nothing else leaves the machine            HTTPS endpoint  ──►  aggregation
                                                     │
                                     community.json  ◄── CommunityAggregate
                                                     │
                                                     ▼
                             assess_health() blends a "community" signal
                             into per-device reliability (attributed)

Every arrow is opt-in and offline-tolerant. If you never enable telemetry, never set an endpoint, or are simply offline, records queue locally (or aren't built at all) and every command behaves exactly as before.

What is shared — and what never is

The wire format is a strict allowlist (TelemetryRecord): a record can only contain the fields declared on that model, so nothing else can leak even as history schemas evolve.

Shared (anonymous engineering metadata): public provider & device ids, outcome (pass/fail), runtime, queue time, estimated cost, a bucketed shot count, calibration age, routing strategy, tool version, the calendar day, and a random install_id that maps to nothing.

Never shared: circuits, gates, or QASM · measurement counts or probability distributions · snapshots, test ids, file paths, git shas, or seeds · credentials, API keys, or any personal information.

See Privacy for the full contract, and run qont telemetry preview to see the literal records that would be sent from your history.

Architecture properties

  • Consent-gated. telemetry.enabled defaults to false; capture, queue, and sync are all no-ops until you qont telemetry enable.
  • Local caching / outbox. Records are captured to an append-only .qontinuum/telemetry/outbox.jsonl and only leave on an explicit sync.
  • Integrity. Each record is signed with a sha256 over its canonical form; tampered or corrupt lines are dropped on read, never trusted.
  • Schema versioning. Both the upload record and the community snapshot carry a schema_version; incompatible snapshots are ignored rather than misread.
  • Secure transport. Sync refuses any non-https:// endpoint. The network call is a single injected seam (transport), so it is auditable and testable.
  • Graceful offline. No endpoint, no network, a timeout, a non-2xx, or a bad response all leave the queue intact and report why — telemetry never blocks or breaks a run.

How it improves recommendations

When a community snapshot has been synced, assess_health blends a per-device community success signal into reliability, weighted by sample size and clearly attributed as a community data source (visible in qont health). Confidence rises with the evidence. With no snapshot present, the assessment is identical to the offline catalog + local-history result — community intelligence is always additive, never load-bearing.

Commands

$ qont telemetry status      # consent, endpoint, queued records, community cache
$ qont telemetry enable      # opt in (states exactly what is shared)
$ qont telemetry preview     # the literal records that would be sent
$ qont telemetry sync        # flush the outbox (safe offline)
$ qont telemetry community   # the cached community snapshot
$ qont telemetry disable     # opt out
$ qont telemetry clear       # delete queued records without sending

Running your own endpoint

The client speaks a tiny HTTP contract so the network is not tied to any single host: POST {endpoint}/contribute with {schema, install_id, records[]}, and GET/POST {endpoint}/community returning {"community": <CommunityAggregate>}. Set it with qont config set telemetry.endpoint https://…. No hosted endpoint is required to use Qontinuum; the aggregation service is deliberately out of the client's trust boundary.