Elon Musk said Wednesday he expects a wireless brain chip developed by his company Neuralink to begin human clinical trials in six months, after the company missed earlier timelines set by him.
Musk even took his commitment to the technology a step further by saying he would
implant a Neuralink chip into his own brain.
The Neuralink brain chip interfact (BCI) implant could even bestow "superhuman cognition" on people, Musk said.
Neuralink is developing BCIs that it says could help disabled patients to move and communicate again, with Musk adding it will also target restoring vision and full body functionality—even for those born blind or with severed spinal cords.
Based in the San Francisco Bay Area and Austin, Texas, and founded in 2016 by Musk, Neuralink has in recent years been conducting tests on animals as it seeks approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to begin clinical trials in people.
"We want to be extremely careful and certain that it will work well before putting a device into a human," Musk said during a much-awaited public update on the device.
Speaking to a crowd of select invitees in a presentation at Neuralink headquarters that lasted nearly three hours, Musk emphasized the speed at which the company is developing its device.
"The progress at first, particularly as it applies to humans, will seem perhaps agonizingly slow, but we are doing all of the things to bring it to scale in parallel," he added. "So, in theory, progress should be exponential."
The FDA said it cannot comment on the status or the existence of any potential product applications.
The first two human applications targeted by the Neuralink device will be in restoring vision and enabling movement of muscles in people who cannot do so, Musk said.
The event was originally planned for Oct. 31 but Musk postponed it just days before without giving a reason.
Neuralink’s last public presentation, more than a year ago, involved a monkey with a brain chip that played a computer game by thinking alone.
Musk, who also runs electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla , rocket firm SpaceX, and social media platform Twitter, is known for lofty goals such as colonizing Mars and saving humanity. His ambitions for Neuralink, which he launched in 2016, are of the same grand scale.
He wants to develop a chip that would allow the brain to control complex electronic devices and eventually allow people with paralysis to regain motor function and treat brain diseases such as Parkinson's, dementia and Alzheimer's. He also talks of melding the brain with artificial intelligence.
Neuralink, however, is running behind schedule. Musk said in a 2019 presentation he was aiming to receive regulatory approval by the end of 2020. He then said at a conference in late 2021 that he hoped to start human trials this year.
Neuralink has repeatedly missed internal deadlines to gain FDA approval to start human trials, current and former employees have said.
Dose of Skepticism
However, none of Neuralink's devices have been tested on humans or approved by the FDA, Xing Chen, assistant professor of opthamology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine told CNBC.
"Neuralink is a company [that] doesn't have to answer to shareholders," Chen said of Neuralink being privately held. "I don't know how much oversight is involved, but I think it's very important for the public to always keep in mind that before anything has been approved by the FDA, or any governmental regulatory body, all claims need to be very, very skeptically exmined."
At the Wednesday presentation, Musk showed footage of a money with a Neuralink in its brain playing video games telepathically.
Neuralink has been criticized for mistreatment of its monkeys. On Wednesday, the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine asked Neuralink to release information on its experiments that on its laboratory monkeys have caused internal bleeding, payalysis, serious infections, seizures, psychological deterioration and death.
Competitors
Although Chen said it is important to wait to see how Neuralink's techonology pans out, BCIs have shown success in a handful of cases on physically impaired humans.
"There's quite a few disorders, such as epilepsy, Parkinson's and obsessive-compulsive disorder, in which people have received brain implants, and the disorders have been treated quite successfully, allowing them to have an improved quality of life," Chen says. "There is a precedent for doing this."
Blackrock Neurotech is planning to bring a BCI solution to market in 2023. The FDA gave Synchron approval in 2021 for permanently implanted BCIs, and Paradromics plans to begin human testing of its BCIs in 2023.
© 2025 Thomson/Reuters. All rights reserved.