China Beats Musk To World’s First ‘Brain-Computer Interface’ After Human Surgery

A paralyzed man in China became the first person on Earth to receive a brain chip cleared for sale.

Chinese neurotech firm Neuracle placed its coin-sized Neural Electronic Opportunity device onto the man’s brain, the South China Morning Post reported Wednesday. The brain-computer interface gave him control of a robotic glove with his thoughts, after a spinal injury took away his ability to use his hand ten years ago. Neuracle is ahead of Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which must complete clinical trials before selling its brain chip in the U.S.

Doctors at Huashan Hospital in Shanghai implanted the patient with the NEO. The patient is recovering, and the device was able to capture his “stable, high-quality” brain signals during the operation, according to the South China Morning Post.

Neuralink, Neuracle, the Embassy of China, and Synchron each did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.

After it is surgically implanted on the patient’s brain, the NEO device records neuron electrical signals as he or she imagines hand motion, Gizmodo reported. A computer then translates these signals into the motion of the patient’s robotic glove.

“[W]hile Neuralink still leads in tech, China is playing a game of deployment, becoming the first to market with a passable product and iterating in the field after collecting IRL data, the same playbook with EVs and humanoid robots,” Aric Chang, founder and managing partner of PrototypeVC said on X.

China’s Neuracle is not truly “beating” Neuralink, he argued, because Neuracle uses just eight electrodes resting on the brain’s surface, while Neuralink threads over 1,000 directly into brain tissue.

The “Precise Robotically IMplanted Brain-Computer InterfacE” (PRIME) is the first in-human study on the safety of Neuralink’s technology, according to a National Library of Medicine overview of the study. The first person was implanted as part of the Neuralink trial in January 2024, Musk announced on X.

“Life expectancy ≥ 12 months” and “presence of a stable caregiver” are among the criteria for participation in the Neuralink study, which is expected to be completed in 2031, according to the study.

Synchron, a brain-computer interface (BCI) company, received the first FDA Investigational Device Exemption for a permanently implanted BCI in 2021. The company announced “positive results” in 2024 after six study participants used its BCI device for 12 months, according to a Business Wire press release.

In June, Meta announced Brain2Qwerty v2, an improved version of the company’s AI system that converts brain signals into typed sentences. “[Brain2Qwerty v2 is] the highest-performing end-to-end pipeline capable of real-time sentence decoding from non-invasive brain recordings, approaching levels of accuracy previously exclusive to techniques that require brain surgery,” a Meta blog post said.