The quantum-advantage ledger audits 650 papers (2024–2026) on quantum-supremacy / quantum-advantage claims across random-circuit sampling, BosonSampling, IQP / boson sampling cousins, hybrid VQE / QAOA, and quantum-ML proposals. The harness consists of 14 bills (closure mechanisms a frontier QA claim must pay), six meta-costs, and three escape gates (G1 methodology, G2 negative-result, G3 theoretical-construction).
Three bills are predicted ★ empty: Bill 8 (cross-platform / cross-architecture shared-subroutine quantum advantage — cousin to Factorization Bill 8 and Lattice Crypto Bill 16), Bill 12 (post-classical-rebuttal QA claim survives held-out audit at frontier qubit count), Bill 13 (frontier QA claim survives all eight audits including XEB-faithfulness and circuit-fidelity decoupling). All three hold across the 650-paper batch. The strongest empty-space anchor is the post-2024 classical-rebuttal cascade: every quantum-supremacy claim from Sycamore-2019 through Zuchongzhi-3-2024 has been narrowed by classical algorithms within 12–73 days of the original announcement.
The signature finding is Bill 4 self-validation tautology: XEB defines quantum advantage AND validates quantum advantage — the same statistical estimator both defines the success metric and is used as the proof of the success. This domain-invariant pattern recurs in 5 cousin ledgers (Mech Interp Bill 5, Lattice Crypto cost-fudges, Capability Benchmarks Bill 10, Inference-time Safety Bill 10, Compute Governance Bill 14). Zhang-Wallace 2024 directly tests it. This document is the locked v0.2 preprint of the bills definition.