Measuring Control-Plane Openness in Near-Term Quantum Computing: A Rubric, Its Validation, and an Application to Thirteen Vendor Stacks

Abstract

Public access to pulse-level and control-electronics interfaces in commercial quantum computing has bifurcated. This paper proposes a six-axis rubric for measuring control-plane openness, the layer between gate-level circuit specification and physical control electronics, defined operationally so that the same evidence produces the same grade across vendors. The rubric is validated three ways: a blinded re-grading pass that tests whether the cited evidence and the level definitions alone reproduce the recorded grades, a boundary-case methodology that fixes where each level begins and ends, and a published grading protocol that lets others reproduce and contest any cell. A time-point comparison anchored on the February 2025 removal of pulse-level access from IBM hardware establishes that the rubric measures change rather than describing a snapshot. The rubric is applied to thirteen commercial vendors across superconducting, trapped-ion, neutral-atom, and photonic modalities as of May 1, 2026, and one of the three harms it detects is demonstrated through a reproduction-access audit of five pre-2025 IBM Qiskit Pulse experiments, carried through to a structural port to Rigetti Quil-T. The catalog ships as a machine-readable artifact under CC-BY-4.0 with per-cell source URLs (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20163276). The readings will go stale; the rubric is the contribution that survives them.

16 pages, 4 tables, 2 figures. Accompanying machine-readable catalog (CC-BY-4.0) at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20163276