For the third time this year, the US Securities and Exchange Commission is being urged to investigate allegations of whether Elon Musk made misleading claims to investors about the deaths of primates used for research by Neuralink, his brain-chip startup.
The latest claims center around his recent statements at the New York Times DealBook Summit that primates who died after implant surgeries were selected for experimentation because they were already close to death. In a letter sent to federal regulators today, an animal rights advocacy and research group claims that Musk’s statements are inaccurate and amount to “possible securities fraud.”
This marks the third letter to the SEC since late September requesting an investigation into Musk’s comments about Neuralink’s test subjects. Records related to Neuralink’s research reviewed by WIRED paint a complicated picture of the health of the monkeys used to develop the company’s brain-chip implants, which will soon be used in human trials.
The most recent letter, written by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, centers on an interview between Musk and Times financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin on November 29. Asked to respond to reports of the gruesome deaths that occurred during early Neuralink experiments at UC Davis, Musk told the audience that the monkeys who endured experimental surgeries were already terminal. “It’s the kind of thing which we could only put in a monkey that’s about to die,” he said, referring to his experimental chip, adding, “It didn’t die because of the Neuralink, it died because it had a terminal case of cancer or something like that.”
The Physicians Committee’s letter alleges that there is no proof that primates had fatal conditions before receiving implants. Citing veterinary records the organization obtained last year, the letter claims that Neuralink scientists performed experimental surgeries on previously healthy primates, some of which went on to suffer complications ranging from serious fungal infections to loosely implanted chips to bleeding or swelling in their brain.
Previously unreported medical examination records describe the overall physical well-being of the primates prior to undergoing Neuralink experiments. WIRED’s review of those records found that some primates underwent extensive “pre-project” health examinations at UC Davis before being approved for the Neuralink studies, which began at the university’s facilities in 2017 and concluded in 2020. According to experts, while the paperwork indicates that those animals were to eventually undergo terminal surgeries—meaning they would be euthanized after experimental procedures—their medical examinations did not suggest that they had serious health conditions that could be considered terminal.