- Several company employees say that Elon Musk pressured them to move faster, causing errors in some surgeries that ended up causing unnecessary suffering and death.

Elon Musk at an event in 2020 where he presented the Neuralink trailer.

The United States investigates Neuralink for its animal tests

Neuralink, Elon Musk's project that aims to insert chips into the brain, is being investigated by the Inspector General of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) for its animal tests, according to Reuters. Rumors suggest that its chips could begin to be applied to humans in six months, but before that, it has been tested on animals and some employees have claimed that there has been "unnecessary suffering and death."

Reuters has reported that an estimated 1,500 animals have been killed by Neuralink since 2018, including more than 280 sheep, pigs, and monkeys. Initially, the company passed all USDA inspections, so the death toll does not imply that they are breaking the law. However, some internal staff pressure from the founder of the project (Musk) to speed up the process meant that mortality rates increased.

Reports that the media outlet has brought to light suggest that Musk "encouraged" his employees to be faster by telling them to imagine they had a bomb strapped to their heads. In addition, the businessman sent an email along with an article that talked about an implant that they had created in Switzerland and had helped a person to walk again: "We are not moving fast enough. It is driving me crazy!".

Image of the device that the company intends to place in human heads to connect the brains to machines. / Neuralink

One employee stressed that rushed surgeries on animals caused stressed and untrained workers to make mistakes. One such example was the placement of the brain-machine interface device on the wrong vertebra of two pigs. This could have been easily avoided by counting the vertebrae, but the speed with which they had to carry out the tests led to a mistake that forced them to euthanize the animals to end their suffering.

Faced with the accusations, Elon Musk has defended himself by saying that they are "extremely careful": "Before even thinking about putting a device on an animal, we do everything possible with rigorous laboratory tests." However, Reuters has spoken of the existence of Neuralink records that show that there have been "exploratory surgeries."

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