A four-day invitation-only summit opened today at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, California, with the explicit goal of converting neurotechnology ethics principles into enforceable governance tools. Organised by BrainMind, with partnership from UNESCO, the OECD, IEEE, and the BRAIN Initiative Alliance, “Asilomar for the Brain and Mind” is modelled on the 1975 Asilomar conference on recombinant DNA, which established the safety norms that shaped a generation of genetic research.
The summit runs from March 29 through April 1 and operates under Chatham House Rule. Rather than producing another declaration of principles, the meeting’s seven working groups are tasked with delivering specific, implementable outputs: a NeuroTrust Index for rating transparency and accountability in neurotech companies, investor due diligence frameworks, neural data governance model policies, an annual industry safety scorecard, and operational ethics toolkits for neuro-entrepreneurs.
The agenda reflects the organisers’ view that the neuroethics field has reached a point of principle saturation. International bodies including the OECD, IEEE, the US BRAIN Initiative, and the Global Neuroethics Summit have already articulated shared values around agency, mental privacy, misuse prevention, and equity. The challenge now is implementation, and the summit’s working groups are structured to produce resources that companies, investors, and regulators can adopt directly.
David Winickoff of the OECD and Karen Rommelfanger of the Ningen Neuroethics Co-Lab lead a session on activating neurotechnology policy on Tuesday. Jacob Robinson of Rice University, who also sits on IEEE’s neurotechnology standards committees and co-founded Motif Neurotech, co-leads a working group on translating neural data ethics values into concrete governance procedures. Consumer Reports’ Ben Moskowitz and Stephen Damianos of the Neurorights Foundation are building what they describe as an annual industry scorecard to track the sector’s ethical performance over time.
The investor perspective is represented by Amy Kruse of Satori Neuro and Juan Enriquez of Excel Venture Management, who co-lead a working group on ethics and reputation risk at the board level. Their session addresses a practical gap: venture-backed neurotech companies face growing scrutiny from institutional investors on neural data practices, but few standardised frameworks exist for assessing ethical risk alongside financial risk. Adam Caplan of Jumpspace Ventures leads a parallel track on due diligence questions and investor-founder alignment on ethics commitments.
Nita Farahany of Duke University, a prominent voice on cognitive liberty and neural data rights, presents the workshop highlights and calls to action on the final day. Farahany, who also serves on the Uniform Law Commission, has been central to the push for legislation protecting neural data, including Colorado’s 2024 law extending biological data protections to neural information.
The patient and end-user perspective comes from Jennifer French of the Neurotech Network and Katie Sale of the American Brain Coalition, who lead a working group on external stakeholder engagement. Their focus is on ensuring that governance frameworks account for the people who use neurotechnology, not just those who build and fund it.
BrainMind, founded in 2018, describes its community as spanning more than 5,000 leaders across neuroscience, technology, venture capital, philanthropy, and lived experience. The Dana Foundation and the Kavli Foundation are funding partners for the summit.
The summit arrives as the neurotechnology industry absorbs several billion dollars in venture funding over the past two years, with Neuralink, Merge Labs, Synchron, and Precision Neuroscience all advancing toward or through clinical milestones. Regulatory frameworks have not kept pace: the FDA clears BCI devices under existing medical device pathways, but no dedicated regulatory regime addresses the unique questions posed by neural data — who owns it, how it can be used, and what protections apply when a device reads directly from the brain.
The 1975 Asilomar conference on DNA succeeded in part because it produced specific, actionable guidelines that funding agencies adopted. The test for this week’s meeting is whether its toolkits gain the same traction with the companies, investors, and regulators who were invited to help build them.