Elon Musk says that thanks to his startup Neuralink, a human has been brain implanted for the first time.

(CNN) — Elon Musk’s controversial Neuralink startup has implanted a chip in the human brain for the first time, the billionaire says a publication On Monday night on its X platform.

He told that the operation was done on Sunday and the patient is recovering.

Musk’s announcement could potentially mark a major milestone in Neuralink’s efforts to take the life-changing technology out of the lab and into the real world. But so far, there are few details.

“Early results show promising neural spike detection,” the world’s richest man said on his proprietary social media platform X.

Neuralink’s first product will be called Telepathy, he said in another post, adding that its first users will be people who have lost the use of their limbs.

He wrote, “Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a typist or an auctioneer. That’s the goal.”

Neuralink has been working on using implants to connect the human brain to computers for half a decade, but the company faced public scrutiny when a monkey died in 2022 during an attempt to play animal pong, which Was one of the first video games.

In May last year, Neuralink received FDA approval to conduct clinical trials in humans, and a few months later the startup began testing patients with quadriplegia caused by cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Started recruiting.

In the trial, patients will have a chip surgically implanted in the part of the brain that controls the urge to move. The chip, installed by a robot, will record brain signals and send to an application, whose initial goal is to “provide people with the ability to control a computer’s cursor or keyboard using only their thoughts,” the company wrote then. While she was recruiting volunteers. September.

Neuralink did not respond to CNN’s request for more details.