Headline results

The latest frozen benchmark, physical-hardware evidence, and the limits that remain open.

Latest frozen QSC-Bench confirmation: retained-residual and fixed-window members completed 210 of 210 registered simulator runs. In the primary scale ladder, both completed 30 of 30 seeds at every width through 65,536 controls with a flat acquisition exponent; the retained median was approximately twelve acquisitions.

Development extension: both confirmed five of five runs at one million controls. This is development evidence, not a primary confirmation tier and not an independent community replication.

Comparator boundary: the diagonal secant member fell from 28 of 30 successes at width 16 to 1 of 30 at width 4,096 and 0 of 30 at 16,384 and 65,536. It is therefore unavailable to automatic or explicit production selection.

Physical hardware: the public archive includes a Rigetti Cepheus closed loop under software-commanded disturbance and static or ablation diagnostics on IQM and IBM hardware. These results do not establish native-drift compensation on a QPU.

Independent manuscript reference: a separate controlled-simulation ladder reaches one hundred million channels at one seed on the top rung. That range, plant, and implementation do not authorize a production switching rule at the hosted 4,096-control ceiling.

Open proof: no fabricated photonic or in-memory chip, native-QPU drift campaign, universal hardware threshold, or end-to-end physical hybrid workload has yet been demonstrated. Maintenance-contract enforcement is deployment behavior, not a manuscript experiment.