America’s leadership in the cutting-edge field of brain technology is being challenged as Chinese startups rise with the support of a full-throttle policy drive.
For years, US companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink Corp. have led the industry with state-of-the-art procedures implanting chips into patients’ brains. A wave of clinical trials by Chinese startups this year is shifting that narrative. A May video by Shanghai StairMed Technology Co. showed a paraplegic patient playing a computer game using only his thoughts, enabled by a coin-shaped implant comparable to the one used in Neuralink surgeries.