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Neuralink's first product would be called Telepathy, Musk said.
CNN –
Elon Musk's controversial startup Neuralink has implanted a chip into a human brain for the first time, the billionaire said in a Post on his X platform late Monday.
The surgery took place on Sunday and the patient is recovering well, he added.
Musk's announcement could mark a major milestone in Neuralink's efforts to bring potentially life-changing technology from the lab to the real world. But he provided few details, and Musk's post doesn't make clear what a significant scientific advance the implantation represents.
The company had received approval to study the safety and functionality of its chip implants and surgical instruments.
“Early results show promising neuron spike detection,” the world’s richest man and Neuralink founder said on X, the social media platform he owns.
Neuralink's first product would be called “Telepathy,” he said in another post, adding that its first users will be people who no longer have the use of their limbs.
“Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer. That is the goal,” he wrote.
Neuralink has been working for half a decade on using implants to connect the human brain to a computer, but the company came under scrutiny after a monkey died in 2022 while trying to use the animal to play Pong, one of the first video games to move. In December 2022, employees told Portal that the company was rushing the market, leading to negligent animal deaths and a federal investigation.
In May last year, Neuralink received FDA approval for human clinical trials, and a few months later the startup began recruiting patients with quadriplegia caused by cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
The study is part of what Neuralink calls its “PRIME study,” short for “Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface,” which aims to examine the safety of its implant and its surgical robot and test the functionality of its device company said in a September blog post about recruiting study participants.
Study patients will have a chip surgically inserted into the part of the brain that controls the intention to move. The chip installed by a robot will then record brain signals and send them to an app. The initial goal is to “give people the ability to control a computer cursor or keyboard using just their thoughts,” the company wrote in September.
Neuralink did not respond to CNN's request for further details.
Before Neuralink's brain implants enter the broader market, they must be approved by regulators. The FDA published a paper in 2021 outlining the agency's initial thoughts on brain-computer interface devices, noting that the field is “making rapid progress.”
While Neuralink and Musk have received significant attention for their attempts at a brain-computer interface, a number of other companies are also active in this space, including a company called Synchron, the first company to receive FDA approval to test a device on People received in 2021. Synchon has since enrolled and implanted patients in a study.
“The idea of brain-nervous system interfaces has great potential to help people with neurological disorders in the future,” Tara Spires-Jones, president of the British Neuroscience Association, told Britain's Science Media Center on Tuesday. “However, most of these interfaces require invasive neurosurgery and are still experimental, so it will likely be many years before they are widely available.”
This story has been updated with additional developments and context.
–CNN's Clare Duffy and Nadia Kounang contributed to this report.