Sunday, October 11, 2026
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Policy & Regulation

UN Secretary-General recommends banning coercive use of neurotechnology in justice systems

In a report to the UN General Assembly dated 27 August 2026 (A/81/351), Secretary-General António Guterres recommends that member states prohibit the compulsory or coercive use of neurotechnology in the administration of justice, including brain-based deception detection, predictive applications, decoding applications that claim to read thoughts, intentions or memories, neuromodulation, and arbitrary or unlawful cognitive surveillance and monitoring. He asks states to recognise neural data as highly sensitive personal data with the highest level of legal protection and clear limits on its collection, processing, sale, storage, retention, reuse and sharing, to require free, prior, informed, explicit and revocable consent for any use of neurotechnology in justice settings, and to urge neurotechnology companies to carry out human rights due diligence. The report, requested by the General Assembly in December 2024, warns, citing outside research, that neural data gathered by consumer devices may be accessed by state authorities or introduced as evidence. Its recommendations do not bind governments.

Oct 11, 2026 · 8 min read

Market Moves

Sabi raises $50 million for a brain-sensing baseball cap

Khosla Ventures has led a $50 million seed round in Sabi, a California startup building a baseball cap meant to turn imagined words and trained mental commands into text and instructions for AI assistants. Accel, Initialized Capital, former OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil, DST Global, Collaborative Fund and Ascend also invested, Sabi announced on 9 October 2026. Forbes put the valuation at $600 million, citing a person familiar with the deal. The cap is designed to read brain signals through hair with sensors built around a custom EEG chip, and to decode them with a model Sabi says was trained on more than 100,000 hours of labelled recordings. In April, Sabi said its first product would be a beanie available by the end of 2026. The cap will now debut as an early prototype at CES in January, and Forbes reported that it will not be available until 2027. Sabi has named no price and published no peer-reviewed results, and its only accuracy figure, up to 77 per cent, comes from a wired laboratory prototype.

Oct 11 · 6 min read

Industry News

Precision Neuroscience posts a 70-patient map of the human nervous system

Precision Neuroscience announced on 8 October 2026 a preprint, posted on bioRxiv on 1 October, that describes an atlas of the human central nervous system built from recordings in the first 70 patients fitted with its Layer 7 thin-film electrode array. The array sits on the surface of the brain and holds FDA 510(k) clearance for temporary use of less than 30 days. The atlas spans motor, sensory, language and auditory cortex, and also the brainstem and spinal cord, across more than 100,000 electrode placements. Precision says the total number of patients implanted with its system has now passed 100. Its chief science officer, Benjamin Rapoport, describes a whole-brain interface as a data milestone assembled across many patients, and its chief data and AI officer, Craig Mermel, says the company will soon say more about where the data meets artificial intelligence. The preprint has not been peer reviewed, and 16 of its 61 authors work for Precision.

Oct 9 · 4 min read

Market Moves

Bridge Neurotech raises $13.5 million to build a brain-computer interface without surgery

Bridge Neurotech, a Silicon Valley start-up founded in 2026 by Will Biederman, came out of stealth on 6 October with $13.5 million from General Catalyst, reMind Capital, Sunflower Capital, Scott Sandell and others to build a wearable brain-computer interface that images brain activity with functional ultrasound through the skull. It has signed a multi-year research and development agreement to license Butterfly Network's Ultrasound-on-Chip technology, with payments for technology access and development milestones and commitments to buy Butterfly hardware; the value was not disclosed. Biederman co-founded the ultrasound research group Forest Neurotech, which signed a five-year, $20 million co-development deal with Butterfly in 2023. Forest's other two co-founders, Sumner Norman and Tyson Aflalo, went on to co-found Merge Labs, which signed its own Butterfly licensing deal on 1 September. Bridge's first research study, which is observational, is enrolling healthy adults and adults whose skulls were repaired with PEEK or Longeviti implants in Redwood City, California.

Oct 8 · 5 min read

Market Moves

MintNeuro raises $5 million to supply purpose-built chips to neural device makers

MintNeuro, a London semiconductor company spun out of Imperial College London, announced a $5 million round on 7 October 2026 led by Odyssey Ventures, with 33East, JSK Investments and Alumni Ventures joining and Empirical Ventures, Jumpspace Ventures and other early investors investing again. It designs modular chips for neural sensing, signal processing and stimulation that device makers can build on in place of adapted general-purpose components or years of custom chip design. Its partners include Motif Neurotech, which announced a multi-year chip supply agreement with MintNeuro on 30 April for its depression implant, and Amber Therapeutics, whose co-founder Tim Denison chairs MintNeuro. The money will fund product launches, delivery of pre-release chips to partners, a larger team and a stronger US presence. MintNeuro's last disclosed equity round was £1 million in November 2024.

Oct 8 · 4 min read

Industry News

Nobel laureate Karl Deisseroth says light-based brain-computer interfaces will take a little time to build

Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute shares the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, announced on 5 October, with Peter Hegemann of Humboldt University of Berlin and Georg Nagel of the University of Würzburg for discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics, the method of making chosen nerve cells switch on or off in response to light. Asked what the work means for neurotechnology devices, Deisseroth said brain-computer interfaces mostly run on electricity, recording activity and in some cases stimulating it, and that light could in principle do the same job but probably will take a little time to build. Optogenetics is closer to patients in two other forms. The FDA has accepted Nanoscope Therapeutics' application for MOGENRY, a one-time optogenetic eye injection for adults with retinitis pigmentosa and severe vision loss, with a decision expected in the first half of 2027. MapLight Therapeutics, which Deisseroth co-founded in 2018, plans a Phase 3 trial of a schizophrenia drug whose development drew on optogenetic laboratory work.

Oct 7 · 6 min read

Industry News

Science Corp's PRIMA implant patients averaged a 29-letter vision gain at three years

Science Corporation reported on 5 October 2026 that the 18 patients still assessed for vision at 36 months in PRIMAvera, the pivotal trial of its PRIMA retinal implant for blindness from geographic atrophy in age-related macular degeneration, read on average 29 more letters on a standard eye chart than before surgery. At 12 months the 32 patients then assessed had gained 24.5 letters with PRIMA glasses. At 36 months, 14 of the 18 (78 percent) had gained at least 15 letters. No new safety signal appeared between months 12 and 36, and natural vision in the implanted eye stayed stable. The trial implanted 38 patients at 17 sites in five European countries; 27 were evaluable for safety and 18 for efficacy at 36 months. The results were presented at the EURETINA congress in Vienna and have not yet been peer reviewed. PRIMA went on sale in Europe in July 2026, is now also available in the UK, and is pending FDA approval in the United States.

Oct 6 · 4 min read

Industry News

Tianjin University releases a 3-gram brain-signal recorder that sits hidden in the hair

Tianjin University's Haihe Laboratory of Brain-Computer Interaction and Human-Machine Integration and its partner Shengong Diting (Tianjin) Technology announced the Shengong Xumi Brain Cube on 30 September 2026, a non-invasive EEG device weighing 3 grams and measuring about 2 cubic centimetres, with electrodes, circuitry, battery and wireless link in one unit fixed to the scalp among the hair. It records at 1,000 samples a second for 8 to 10 hours, and its developers call it the smallest and lightest non-invasive brain-computer interface system yet made. The lab says it is building safety management models around the device for workers in China's licensed high-risk trades, with guidance from special-operations and emergency-management departments. China's national BCI plan names hazardous materials, nuclear, mining and power as industries to pilot the technology first.

Oct 4 · 3 min read

Industry News

Neuralink cuts some implant users' calibration from 10 minutes a day to 10 minutes a week

Neuralink said on 1 October 2026 that participants in its clinical trial have streamed more than 50,000 hours of unlabelled brain recordings during everyday use of its implant, and that it has used participants' own recordings to pretrain participant-specific models that steady the software turning brain signals into cursor movement. Calibration had averaged 55 minutes a week across participants, typically 10 minutes at the start of each day; some participants now calibrate for 10 minutes a week. Six participants set personal bests on Neuralink's cursor test, and one reached 11.32 bits per second, which the company calls a record for a brain-computer interface. Every live result came from a model trained on a single participant's data, and models pooled across participants have not yet performed better. Neuralink's stated next goals are calibrating once, never calibrating, and a shared 'API for the motor cortex' for developers.

Oct 3 · 5 min read