the use of 'quantum' appears to be tagging onto the potential of quantum annealers (which have repetitively [1] [2] been shown to be classically tractable) while trying to mimic a kind of quantum tunneling, ie the annealing schedule, without any kind of promises about exponential speedups etc. Quantum annealers themselves have few promised advantages for general combinatorial optimization problems without significant changes to extant hardware paradigms [3]

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05693 [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22117 [3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.09913