Quantum computing and artificial intelligence are often discussed as two separate frontiers. One is about exploiting quantum mechanics for computation; the other is about building increasingly capable learning systems and agents. The core argument behind TensorCircuit-NG is that this separation is becoming less and less meaningful. If modern AI infrastructure has already solved core problems around automatic differentiation, compilation, accelerator execution, batching, and distributed training, then quantum software should stop reinventing those layers badly and start standing on top of them directly.
This is the central idea behind TensorCircuit-NG. The project is a quantum software stack built in the age of AI, aimed at AI-facing workloads, and increasingly shaped for collaboration with AI agents. Its vision is simple: quantum software on AI, for AI, with AI.
On AI: quantum software should inherit the AI stack
Quantum software has long been held back by two familiar problems. Too much of the workload remains trapped in Python-level control flow or in classical state-vector simulation patterns that scale poorly. At the same time, many quantum libraries sit outside the deep learning ecosystems where most of the tooling innovation has happened. JAX, PyTorch, and TensorFlow already have mature answers to questions like compilation, vectorization, accelerator placement, and distributed execution, yet quantum software has often kept those capabilities at the edge of the stack.
TensorCircuit-NG takes a different route. The framework treats quantum circuits as specialized tensor operations. That design choice opens up a large part of the AI toolchain almost “for free.” Automatic differentiation maps naturally onto variational quantum algorithms. Just-in-time compilation matters for repeated circuit evaluation. Vectorized mapping matters for batching over parameters, measurements, trajectories, or datasets. Accelerator support, mixed precision, and distributed execution are part of the design from the beginning.
That philosophy shows up in the architecture. TensorCircuit-NG is built around a tensor-first worldview: every object is either a tensor or a network of tensors. Once that is the primitive, different computational models become easier to compose inside one workflow. Gate-based circuits, tensor networks, neural models, noisy simulators, analog evolution, approximate methods, and symbolic representations can live inside one coherent environment.
The performance story follows directly from this design. TensorCircuit-NG supports both data parallelism and model parallelism across multiple devices and multiple hosts. In practice that means distribution over inputs, measurements, or noisy trajectories when the workload is embarrassingly parallel, and distribution over tensor-network slices when the contraction itself needs to be split across hardware. Benchmarks on both single-GPU and multi-GPU systems show that high-level Python APIs can still deliver high performance when the compilation and tensor-network substrate are done well.In representative workloads, that performance has reached speedups of several orders of magnitude over mainstream stacks such as IBM's Qiskit and Google's TensorFlow Quantum.
TensorCircuit-NG acts as a bridge among quantum computing, high-performance computing, and intelligent computing. It also serves as an interface layer where quantum models can coexist with the rest of modern computational science. Researchers who want to embed quantum layers inside larger machine learning systems should be able to do so inside the same workflow, without crossing ecosystem boundaries every time the problem gets interesting.
For AI: a platform for fast quantum machine learning
This is where the infrastructure becomes immediately useful. Quantum machine learning sits right at the intersection of circuit design, optimization, data pipelines, and repeated simulation. It is a workload that punishes slow software. If researchers want to try new ansatzes, change encodings, run ablations, train over many seeds, or sweep hyperparameters, then fast prototyping and efficient simulation matter more than slogans about QML.
TensorCircuit-NG provides a strong platform for exactly this kind of work. Differentiable circuits, JIT compilation, batching, accelerator support, and distributed execution all live inside one environment. That makes it much easier to move from an idea for a QML model to a runnable prototype, and from a prototype to a meaningful simulation campaign.
The scientific motivation for QML also becomes clearer in this setting. Attention shifts away from isolated benchmark wins and toward how quantum models behave on problems that already hurt classical AI. In our own work, this has already led to two systematic studies: one on bad data, and one on changing data.
The first studies robustness. When labels are noisy, data is poisoned, or part of the training set later needs to be removed, quantum models may show a more favorable degradation profile and may be easier to unlearn. The second studies plasticity. In continual-learning settings, quantum models may preserve the ability to absorb new tasks for longer instead of becoming rigid.
These are still open research questions. For a software project, though, the main point is straightforward: if people want to explore QML seriously, they need a platform that makes rapid iteration cheap. TensorCircuit-NG is meant to be that platform. It gives researchers a practical environment for fast QML prototyping, efficient simulation, and large-scale testing of ideas about robustness, unlearning, and adaptation.
With AI: a platform for agent-driven research
The same logic carries over to AI agents. Once a scientific software stack is fast, structured, and composable, it becomes a natural substrate for agent-driven development. Agents are useful only when they can read real code, run real tools, inspect results, and keep iterating inside a live repository. That makes software design itself part of the agent story.
TensorCircuit-NG is built with that use case in mind. The APIs are relatively concise, the examples and tests provide dense reference material, and the repository includes explicit rules and task-specific workflows for AI assistants. This lowers the cost of turning natural-language intent into runnable code, benchmarks, figures, and documentation.
The project also ships built-in skills that push this further:
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arxiv-reproduce, which turns a paper identifier into a reproduction workflow; -
performance-optimize, which injects optimization patterns such asscan,jit,vmap, and contraction tuning; -
tc-rosetta, which translates code from other quantum frameworks with attention to intent rather than syntax alone; -
tutorial-crafter, which converts programs into polished narrative tutorials. - and many more.
Taken together, these tools make the framework a software platform where researchers can move from idea to prototype, from prototype to benchmark, and from benchmark to documentation with much less friction. That is the practical meaning of “with AI” here: TensorCircuit-NG is designed to work well with agents as a real development interface, not just as a chatbot wrapped around the codebase.
The deeper claim
Taken together, these ideas add up to a stack-level thesis about the future of computational research.
First, quantum software should no longer be architected as an isolated niche. It should inherit the best ideas from the AI and HPC worlds and expose them through abstractions that remain mathematically faithful to quantum workloads.
Second, that same software stack should provide a strong platform for fast QML prototyping and efficient simulation, so ideas about robustness, unlearning, and continual adaptation can be tested quickly at scale.
Third, the arrival of capable software agents changes the design target for scientific frameworks. A good framework now has to work well for skilled humans and also be understandable, navigable, and productively extensible for agents operating over the entire repository and toolchain.
This is how TensorCircuit-NG understands itself: quantum software on AI, for AI, and with AI. It is built on the modern AI execution model, aimed at AI-relevant scientific questions, and increasingly shaped to participate in agent-mediated research workflows.
Getting started
pip install tensorcircuit-ng
An agent-first workflow also works well: ask your coding agent to install tensorcircuit-ng and start building a small quantum application from natural-language instructions.
