Elon Musk announced on Monday that the startup Neuralink, which he co-founded, performed its first brain implant on a patient on Sunday, an operation that has already been performed several times by other companies and researchers, AFP reported. and Agerpress.

Based in Fremont, California, a suburb of San Francisco, Neuralink received the green light from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in May.

His coin-sized implant has already been installed in the brain of a macaque that has managed to play the video game Pong without a controller or keyboard.

“First results show promising neural activity,” Elon Musk wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

Founded in 2016, Neuralink is far from the first company to create a brain implant, also known as a brain-machine interface (BMI), on a human. In September, the Dutch company Onward announced that it is testing the connection of a brain implant with another that stimulates the spinal cord to allow a quadriplegic patient to regain mobility.

Back in 2019, researchers from Grenoble’s Clinatec Institute presented an implant that, once installed, allows a person with body paralysis to animate their exoskeleton and move their arms or walk.

Neuralink recently raised about $323 million from investors in two tranches, in August and November. The company says it also wants to help paralyzed patients walk again, restore sight to the blind and even cure psychiatric conditions such as depression. Also, Elon Musk proposes to offer his implant to everyone to ensure better communication with computers and control, in his words, “the risk to our civilization” that artificial intelligence represents.