The International Neuroethics Society’s annual meeting opens today at Stanford’s Bechtel Conference Center, running through April 17, with parallel sessions at IMT Lucca in Italy and the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. The theme is “Building Bridges and Cultivating Community.” The schedule is more pointed than that suggests.
Neuroethics 2026 arrives at a moment the field has spent a decade anticipating and has not yet fully reckoned with. The BCI sector closed the first quarter of 2026 with over US$960 million in funding. China has set a public reimbursement price of roughly US$900 for an invasive brain-computer interface procedure. Neuralink has reached twenty implants. DARPA’s O-Circuit programme is building living neural computers. And four US states have enacted neural data privacy laws, with Illinois and New York advancing their own bills this year.
The Stanford programme addresses this directly. On the opening afternoon, research talks include Chuhao Lan presenting on whether brain-computer interfaces should fall under export control, and Lukasz Kamienski examining the ethics of AI-assisted closed-loop BCIs for military enhancement. Karolina Zhukoff will argue for a framework linking neurorights to the architecture of cognitive and state sovereignty. Later in the day, a World Café session on open neurodata and data governance — moderated by Lea Witkowsky and Anita Jwa — continues into a global dialogue the following morning.
Thursday’s “Designing Neurotech for Humanity” panel brings together Spenser Kellis from Blackrock Neuroscience, Kim Old from EMOTIV, Sara Berger from IBM, and Kristen Mathews, a Cooley partner specialising in neural privacy and cybersecurity. The panel’s stated aim is to develop guiding tenets for how neurotechnology will be integrated into society, a question that has moved from theoretical to contractual now that companies are actively shipping hardware and collecting neural data from paying customers. In the same time slot, Anita Jwa and colleagues present a critical analysis of neuroimaging-based mind reading, and Amanda van Beinum presents “OUR BCI,” a framework for outlining user-defined goals for responsible innovation in implanted brain-computer interfaces.
Friday’s keynote, “A Neurolaw Manifesto” by Francis Shen, with responses from legal scholars Deborah Denno and Andrea Lavazza, signals the moment at which neuroethics moves explicitly toward actionable law. The closing day also features the BCI Pioneers Coalition, represented by Ian Burkhart — the first person to restore movement to a paralysed hand through an implanted BCI — alongside Philipp Kellmeyer and Michelle Pham, discussing what community-engaged collaboration looks like when the community now includes people who live with commercial devices in their heads.
The governance context framing the conference has sharpened considerably since the last annual meeting. Colorado, Minnesota, California and New Hampshire have enacted neural data privacy protections. The GAO’s 2026 horizon scan confirmed that neural data collected outside clinical settings is not clearly covered by HIPAA. Chile enshrined neuro-rights in its constitution in 2021; Colombia has since introduced its own legislative framework. At the federal level in the United States, the MIND Act directs the FTC to study neural data protection but does not create new legal obligations, leaving a gap between state-level momentum and federal action.
This matters because the cost of embedding governance post-hoc rises sharply once commercial norms are set. A recent paper in IBRO Neuroscience Reports by Jackson Tyler Boonstra at VU Amsterdam identified the core tension: the mismatch between commercial claims and the technical limitations of current BCI systems means that consent frameworks, privacy protections and long-term safety monitoring are lagging behind the devices they are meant to govern.
The conference runs through Thursday at Stanford, with parallel sessions in Lucca and Stellenbosch streaming through Friday. Registration remains open for virtual attendance.