With an increase in interest in wearable tech, some companies are going a step further: surgical implantation. Brain-computer interfaces establish a direct communication pathway between the electrical activity in a person’s brain and an external device, like a computer or robotic limb. Neuralink, a brain-computer interface company, has conducted procedures in the UK and Canada. The implant is designed to restore some control in daily routines for people with varying disabilities. With Canada being the third country implementing the technology, researchers will be able to gain more data on how the system performs in real life. Elon Musk, Neuralink’s founder, has suggested the technology could attempt to restore limited sight to virtually impaired patients as early as 2026. 

Sam Altman recently outlined OpenAI’s plans to back a brain-computer interface startup to rival Musk’s Neuralink. Altman is co-founding Merge Labs with funding from OpenAI’s ventures team. The company’s goal is reportedly to allow humans to “merge” with AI. Merge Labs is working with Alex Bania, who runs Tools for Humanity, Altman’s eye-scanning digital ID company that has been suspended in several countries over privacy and data protection concerns. 

Brain-computer interfaces raise numerous ethical challenges, chief among them privacy and security concerns including unauthorized access to or misuse of sensitive neural data. Establishing explicit consent for how companies collect, store, and use this data is paramount. The lack of regulation over this technology raises legal risk; the difficulty in determining the degree of user liability for actions performed using BCIs leaves companies vulnerable to litigation. Experts are calling for robust legal protection and revision of existing privacy laws to specifically address the volume and sensitivity of brain-computer interface data.

Potentially side-stepping some of these concerns, AlterEgo, an MIT-affiliated startup, is commercializing a wearable device that allows users to communicate silently with computers. The device detects faint neuromuscular signals in the face and throat when a person internally verbalizes words. Those signals are decoded by machine learning software and transmitted as commands or text. Unlike Neuralink, which is more invasive, AlterEgo does not attempt to decode thought directly, a distinction the company emphasizes is a safeguard for user privacy. The technology has been positioned as a potential aid for people with speech impairments and other applications in human-computer interaction. It could facilitate a user being able to whisper a command to an AI assistant in a crowded room without being overheard.