Media: U.S. authorities probe Neuralink’s animal testing

The USDA’s Office of Inspector General has opened an investigation into Neuralink over potential violations of animal-care conditions at its research facilities. Reuters reports.

According to employees, the company is rushing the testing of neural chips, often inflicting suffering and death on the animals used in the studies.

According to the publication, since 2018 Neuralink has killed 1,500 animals, including more than 280 sheep, pigs and monkeys. These figures do not by themselves imply legal violations by the researchers, and the company has passed all USDA checks at its facilities.

However, former and current employees have complained of pressure from Neuralink founder Elon Musk to accelerate chip development. They say this has led to faulty experiments and, consequently, a higher mortality rate among animals.

Since the company’s launch in 2016, the billionaire has urged workers to imagine a bomb strapped to their heads to move faster. He also warned that he would trigger a “market crash” if progress did not occur, and some employees interpreted this as a warning that Neuralink might shut down.

Earlier in 2022, Musk sent staff an email with an article about Swiss researchers and the implant they built that helped a paralyzed patient walk again. In a subsequent message, he highlighted Neuralink’s slow chip-testing progress.

“We’re moving too slowly. It’s driving me crazy!” wrote Musk.

Reviewing internal documentation on neural-interface testing, journalists found four experiments involving 86 pigs and two monkeys whose results were suspect due to human error. Researchers were forced to repeat these trials, leading to more animal deaths.

One employee said haste in operations leads to overworked and inadequately trained staff, who ultimately make mistakes.

To corroborate this, journalists found documents detailing cases where Neuralink researchers implanted a neural interface into two different pigs not in the correct vertebra. As a result, they had to euthanize the animals to spare them further suffering.

Earlier, animal-rights activists accused Neuralink of causing “severe suffering” to the test monkeys. Since 2017, seven of 23 primates have survived neural-implant testing.

In December, Elon Musk at the Show and Tell promised to launch clinical trials of Neuralink chips in humans within the next six months.

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