Reading Your Mind: What If the Tyrants’ Dream Came True?
When you start worrying about the technological dangers coming our way, you tend to think of AI first. Fair enough, since it sits in terrible hands and is pretty much out of control. You might also think of robotics, which has made spectacular progress these past few years. Sorry to make your day worse, but we think something nastier is coming: a whole set of techniques in development built to read your thoughts. All your thoughts, even the most private ones.
Please don’t take this lightly. Nobody’s asking whether it works anymore, only how long before it does. Honestly, I don’t know if we can still stop this madness, because we don’t weigh much against the billions of dollars pouring into neural decoding. But we can start by learning the ins and outs of the thing, so we can campaign hard for it to be tightly regulated at the very least. So here’s the lay of the land. You’ll see, it’s flat-out dizzying.
How neural decoding works with a brain-computer interface
Your brain never shuts off. Every thought, every emotion, every intention throws off electrical activity you can measure. We call them brain waves. From there, BCI technology (Brain-Computer Interface) picks up those signals and turns them into usable data. And that’s where AI comes in. Without machine learning algorithms able to chew through billions of micro-signals in real time, those waves are just meaningless noise. So ever sharper sensors and ever stronger AI will tip this technology out of medicine and into surveillance.
Brain implants, for when precision takes surgery
Electrodes go straight onto or into the cortex. You get a clean signal and maximum precision. Neuralink and BrainGate went this way, and so has American military research through DARPA. For now it stays limited to extreme medical cases, but the patents on file don’t only talk about medicine. Far from it! For anyone who wants to spy on your brain, the upside is a signal that’s clean, readable and usable. The one big drawback is that it takes surgery. Not exactly practical for watching a whole population. Unless you make electrode implants mandatory for part of the population, or even all of it.
EEG is the techno-fascists’ holy grail
This time, no surgery at all. Just a helmet or a headband pressing electrodes against your skull. That’s enough for EEG to pick up the brain’s electrical activity right through the bone. It’s way less precise than an implant for now, but it’s improving fast. And more to the point, it can be rolled out very quickly on a huge scale. Brain fingerprinting already shows up in court proceedings in India. And in 2023, researchers at the University of Texas reconstructed whole sentences from an EEG signal. So none of this is speculation. It’s published research with concrete applications right now.
Who’s pushing brain-machine interfaces and with whose money?
The global brain-computer interface market has crossed an impressive threshold. In two years, venture capital in the sector multiplied by 3.5, from $662 million in 2022 to $2.3 billion in 2024. Five of the world’s biggest fortunes have put personal money in. No surprise there, the CIA’s investment arm is in the mix too. And since September 2025, Meta has already been selling the first consumer neural wristband.
That’s the first real move by a Big Tech company. Behind the acceleration sits a network of official players, tech giants working in the background, Gulf sovereign wealth funds, military agencies and ideologically driven billionaires. So here’s who’s pushing this technology, how and with what money:
Neuralink leads the sector on valuation and visibility. Elon Musk founded it in 2016, and it has raised roughly $1.3 billion over six rounds, hitting a $9 billion valuation in June 2025. Musk personally threw in $100 million at the seed stage. The latest round, closed in May 2025 at $650 million, pulled in ARK Invest, Sequoia Capital and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, along with G42, which is tied to Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, and the Qatar Investment Authority. By the end of 2025, twelve patients in four countries carry the N1 Link implant. The first of them, Noland Arbaugh, a quadriplegic, uses his interface about ten hours a day to browse the web and play chess.
Synchron holds second place strategically, with $345 million raised and a valuation close to a billion. Its approach differs from Neuralink’s: the Stentrode goes in through the jugular vein, so nobody has to open your skull. That less invasive profile attracts a telling lineup of investors. Jeff Bezos through Bezos Expeditions, Bill Gates through Gates Frontier, Khosla Ventures, the Qatar Investment Authority and above all In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s investment arm, which confirmed a $200 million stake in November 2025. Synchron now works with Apple to let people run iPhones and iPads with their thoughts, and with Nvidia to cut the interface’s latency using AI.
Other players, just as worrying, fill out this fast growing ecosystem. Blackrock Neurotech, which makes the Utah Array implanted in more than 40 patients since 2004, sold a majority stake to Tether for $200 million in April 2024. Peter Thiel had already invested back in 2021. Precision Neuroscience, founded by Benjamin Rapoport, who cofounded Neuralink and left over safety concerns, has raised $155 to $180 million, including a $102 million round in December 2024 with Stanley Druckenmiller’s family office taking part. Its Layer 7 electrode, which doesn’t pierce the tissue, got FDA clearance in March 2025. Paradromics, based in Austin, did its first human implant in May 2025 after taking $18 million straight from DARPA, and just landed an investment from NEOM, the futuristic Saudi megacity that wants a BCI center of excellence on site. Kernel, founded by Bryan Johnson with $100 million of his own money from selling Braintree to PayPal, pivoted to noninvasive work but has kept a low profile since 2020. Merge Labs, cofounded in 2025 by Sam Altman with OpenAI as lead investor, closed a $250 million round to build a non-implantable ultrasound interface.
Big Tech, meanwhile, moves under cover. The strategy looks more like quiet infiltration than official announcement. Patents, discreet acquisitions and strategic partnerships sketch a much deeper presence than the press releases let on.
Right now Meta is furthest along and the only one to have crossed into commercial territory. In 2019, Facebook bought CTRL-labs for somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. That startup had already pulled in Google Ventures, Amazon’s Alexa Fund and Founders Fund. Six years later, on September 30, 2025, Meta launched the Neural Band, a wristband carrying 16 surface electromyography electrodes. The Trojan horse sells for $799 with Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses. It reads muscle nerve signals so you can run interfaces without touching anything. To pull that off, it was trained on data from nearly 200,000 participants. A July 2025 paper in Nature lays out the science behind it.
Apple plays the patents and accessibility card with calculated discretion. A first patent filed in January 2023 describes AirPods style earbuds fitted with EEG, EMG and EOG electrodes that pick up brain activity, with machine learning choosing which sensors to use on the fly. A second patent from March 2024 builds neural sensors into the headband of a future Apple Vision Pro. In November 2025, Apple published a study on self-supervised learning for EEG using data from in-ear sensors. And in May 2025, the Apple-Synchron partnership extended the Switch Control accessibility framework so people can run an iPhone, an iPad or a Vision Pro straight from their thoughts.
Google Ventures took part in Neuralink’s series C in 2021 and had backed CTRL-labs before Meta bought it. DeepMind, cofounded by neuroscientist Demis Hassabis, keeps a computational neuroscience research program running, a strategic base for future BCI applications. Microsoft holds a 2018 patent describing app control through an EEG headband that could plug into HoloLens, and its research group is actively working on interactive BCIs.
Samsung, partnered with Hanyang University, is building an in-ear EEG device that hits 92.86% accuracy at identifying video preferences, with a direct application in neuromarketing. And Gabe Newell, the founder of Valve, cofounded the Galea headset with OpenBCI, packing EEG, EMG and eye tracking into a VR head strap, and has said publicly that the real world will end up feeling flat and dull next to the experiences we’ll be able to create directly inside people’s brains.
DARPA built this whole industry. Oddly, mainstream press coverage rarely says so. And yet almost every major advance in BCI traces back to American military funding. The agency has launched at least 40 neurotechnology programs in 24 years, with budgets running $50 to $100 million each, for a cumulative investment past a billion dollars since the 2000s. Half of the American invasive BCI companies come, directly or not, out of DARPA programs.
The N3 program, launched in 2018 with a budget of $104 to $125 million, aims to build two-way non-surgical interfaces for able-bodied soldiers, not for patients. Its stated goal is letting a soldier run drone swarms and cyberdefense systems by thought alone. The NESD program, funded at $65 million, paid Paradromics and Brown University directly to develop interfaces that can talk to a million neurons at once. SUBNETS, with $70 million over five years, produced the first closed-loop brain implant prototypes for treating PTSD and depression in veterans. And Silent Talk, run jointly with the Army, explicitly went after telepathic communication between soldiers by reading pre-speech neural signals.
China has built a national strategy on civil-military fusion and makes no secret of it. The China Brain Project, launched in 2016, carries about a billion dollars through 2030 and explicitly targets brain-machine intelligence technology. In December 2021, the US Commerce Department sanctioned the People’s Liberation Army Academy of Military Medical Sciences and eleven affiliated institutes for using biotechnology for military purposes, including alleged brain control weapons. Chinese military doctrine now frames cognitive dominance as a new domain of war. On the industrial side, BrainCo raised $287 million in January 2025, the biggest BCI round ever closed outside the United States. A government fund of 11.6 billion yuan for neuroscience was announced in Shenzhen at the end of 2025. China now counts around 170 companies active in BCI.
Israel, for its part, publicly confirmed in February 2026 that its Defense Ministry’s neurotechnology division is building interfaces that let a single operator run several drones through neural signals, a direct answer to the drone swarm doctrine of Iran’s proxies.
Russia, true to form, stays murkier. But it isn’t sitting this one out: the Balalaika program is developing a multimodal neural interface. And Kommersant reported in 2021 that Putin personally signed off on a research program for brain chips. Nobody has confirmed or formally denied it since.
The money map turns up connections the official announcements deliberately keep quiet. The Qatar Investment Authority stands out as the busiest sovereign fund, having gone into both Neuralink and Synchron in their latest rounds. G42, an Emirati outfit backed by Mubadala, joined that same Neuralink round. Saudi Arabia comes in through NEOM on Paradromics. And Tether, which issues the USDT stablecoin, now holds majority control of Blackrock Neurotech after putting in $200 million. That drops a crypto company with a documented record of opacity into the heart of the global neurotech industry.
In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s investment vehicle, which works with fifteen agencies including the FBI and the NSA, confirmed its position in Synchron at the end of 2025. That’s the first documented direct In-Q-Tel investment in a BCI company. And that signal is anything but trivial, because it says the American intelligence community now treats brain-computer interfaces as an operational interest, well past the military research framework already in place.
Chile wrote neurorights into its constitution in 2021, and no other country has. Meanwhile UNESCO is raising the alarm. The International Committee of the Red Cross published an analysis in August 2025 questioning whether military BCIs square with international humanitarian law, and flagging the risk of fighters reduced to components inside weapons systems. But money moves faster than regulation gets written. In a single year, $2.3 billion in private investment flowed into the sector. The market, worth an estimated $2 to $3 billion today, should hit $9 to $14 billion by 2033. And Morgan Stanley puts the potential commercial market at $400 billion in the United States alone if every medical and consumer application lands.
So once again, nobody’s asking whether brain-computer interfaces will show up in our lives. The question is who will control them, what for and whether we’ll still get a say when that day comes. Don’t count on it!
How are they selling us on decoding our brains?
Same story every time. When a technology risks getting rejected, marketing steps in to smooth the landing. For brain-machine interfaces, the people behind the project say it’s for the good of disabled people. Nicely played! Unless you’re a horrible human being, how can you be against a quadriplegic getting some independence back? We’d love to believe it, but the people sinking billions into this are nowhere near philanthropists. Which means they’re not putting that kind of money on a niche market.
That was phase one of the plan. Phase two slowly gets people used to actually wearing technology on their bodies. Smartwatches do part of the job, smart glasses do most of it. And on that note, if anyone is unlucky enough to come talk to me with a pair of those on their face, they’d better run fast, because I’m not putting up with that! I can’t even understand how gadgets that intrusive on privacy ever got cleared for sale.
That’s still not the endgame. Step three, already underway, makes the technology vanish into objects nobody reads as unnatural anymore. Fitness trackers sold as sports or health accessories are the most common example. Now brainwave headbands are heading down the same road, dressed up as meditation aids or cognitive performance boosters. Plus the earbuds millions of people wear for hours a day, and “smart” clothing. And tomorrow come connected prescription glasses, nearly impossible to tell apart from regular ones! At that point consent gets seriously thorny, because the line between an everyday object and a passive neural collection device disappears completely. And of course, nobody signs a form before putting in their AirPods. That’s exactly the point.
Brain-machine interfaces are an unprecedented danger for all of humanity
Picture the damage once this technology is fully operational. In dictatorships like the ones run by those two psychos Putin and Kim Jong-Un, it’ll be a bloodbath! With paranoid maniacs like that in power, the faintest suspicion of disloyalty and they just strap a headband on a subordinate to find out what he really thinks. And in a theocracy, plenty of people would end up wearing one so somebody can check whether they really believe in God. If not, off to reeducation, or murdered for apostasy.
Big Tech has spent years sparing no expense to crack open every secret in your private life. Neural data access takes that somewhere else entirely. They wouldn’t be reading your clicks, your purchases or your movements anymore. They’d be reading raw emotion, your intentions before you’ve even put words to them, your unconscious reactions to an ad, a political candidate or a piece of news. Cambridge Analytica, global outrage and all, was a rough draft next to what even partial access to your brain signals would allow. And unlike a password or a credit card number, you can’t change your brain once it’s been compromised.
At work, the potential for abuse is just as dizzying. Employers could demand that staff wear neural monitoring devices to grade focus, loyalty or stress levels. Some insurers could tie their rates to neural profiles. Border control systems could fold brainwave reading into threat detection, right next to the facial recognition already running in dozens of countries. And in the democracies coming apart at the seams, the ones where the rule of law is collapsing fast, ruling parties would hold the most fearsome instrument of political control human beings have ever built.
So the question we have to ask is very simple, even if the answer is anything but. Has anyone really weighed all the risks? Have governments, regulators and international institutions grasped the full scale of what’s going up in front of them? No! And another question deserves a straight answer, one the big AI ethics conferences carefully dodge. Is it an accident that the main funders of this technology are either tech multinationals whose entire business model runs on harvesting personal data, or sovereign wealth funds tied to Gulf theocracies where basic rights stop at the palace gates, or authoritarian regimes that turned mass surveillance into a tool of government? Is it really an accident that the people putting billions on the table are exactly the ones with the most to gain from knowing what people actually think, before they even open their mouths? Everyone can answer that for themselves. But the history of surveillance technology has taught us one thing with absolute consistency: they never stay in the hands of the people who claim to control them, and they never serve only the purposes announced at the start.
When does a thought become a crime?
Nobody’s really asking one particular question yet. Everybody should be asking it right now, before it’s too late. When does a thought become a crime? It sounds philosophical, maybe even abstract. It isn’t, at all. The moment a technology can read brain signals and interpret their emotional or possibly intentional content, some people will find the temptation to use it in court irresistible. And that temptation is already here, because lawyers, criminologists and police officials are publicly rubbing their hands at the idea that brain-computer interfaces could revolutionize the justice system. Revolutionize it in which direction, exactly?
Take an example everybody will get, because it concerns everybody. Sexual fantasies. Every single person has them, no exceptions. And the vast majority of people never fully act on them. What goes on inside a human head isn’t an action plan. It’s a mental space where imagination, desire, fear, anger and transgression coexist without ever necessarily crossing over into action. So does a sexual thought about someone who never consented to being the object of that thought count as assault? If the answer is no, and it is no in every legal system still built on acts rather than intentions, then why would that same thought, captured by a neural device, suddenly become admissible evidence in a courtroom?
Push the reasoning into the bedroom and you get to situations that would be funny if they weren’t so telling. Picture the scene: honey, did you cheat on me? Put your interface on, I want to know! And then, disaster! Turns out the person never cheated, but has fantasized about coworkers, neighbors, strangers passed on the street. Which every human being has done since the species existed. Net result: I want a divorce! The thought court will be open to everyone, and the hearings can begin. We can still laugh about it for now, but that grotesque little scene runs on exactly the same logic some people want to bring into courtrooms. Mixing up the thought and the act, the desire and its execution, what crosses a brain and what a person actually chooses to do.
The same reasoning covers much more ordinary situations. Who hasn’t thought, on a Monday morning stuck on the commute or standing in front of an unbearable boss, that they’d like to strangle the guy? That thought runs through millions of brains every day. Maybe billions. It turns into an act in a vanishingly small number of cases. Cases that usually come out of a very specific clinical context. So a neural device picks that signal up at the wrong moment, in a legal or security setting, and it becomes what? Evidence? A dangerousness score? Grounds for enhanced surveillance?
The basic problem is that the human brain doesn’t work like a courtroom. It throws out contradictory thoughts, passing impulses, imaginary scenarios that consciousness sorts, filters and moves past all day long. So reading one thought at one moment, with no access to the whole mental process before and after it, is like judging a novel on a single sentence ripped out of context. The risk of wrongful convictions would be enormous. The risk of manipulation just as big. Because a neural signal can be misread, because the algorithms decoding it are trained on biased data and because the history of forensic medicine is littered with scientific certainties that turned out to be wrong decades later.
We already have a preview of how this plays out. In India, the BEOS system has been used for years in hundreds of police investigations, and a 2008 murder conviction rested partly on its results. The Indian Supreme Court did set limits, but the device keeps getting exported to a dozen other countries. That’s the full-scale lab for what’s coming at us on a bigger scale if nobody puts serious guardrails up.
And that’s where the most immediate danger sits. Not in some science fiction totalitarian regime reading a whole population’s thoughts in real time, since that stays out of technical reach for now. It sits in the slow normalization of partial, imprecise and highly manipulable neural data used in courts and security work, handed to jurors and judges as objective scientific proof. The word “scientific” has a brutal ability to shut a debate down before it starts, and the people pushing neurotech into courtrooms are counting on exactly that.
Since when does Big Tech owe you its agenda?
Big tech companies have one mechanism down cold, because they already ran it to build AI as we know it today. Somebody else carries the heaviest costs and the biggest risks while they collect most of the value. And for brain-computer interfaces, that machine is already running!
The visible part is what the media covers. Quadriplegics, people with ALS or other severe conditions, agreeing to have their skulls opened for an experimental implant. These patients will try anything. And you get it 100%, because the technology offers them a shot at independence they thought was gone forever. Nobody questions their courage or their choice. But let’s call this what it is: those implantations hand the companies funding them the most precise neural data in existence. The kind only electrodes sitting directly on the cortex can produce.
Every implanted patient is also, knowingly or not, an involuntary contributor to a neural codex. Basically a reference dictionary matching specific brain signals to intentions, emotions and motor commands. The richer and sharper that codex gets, the better the decoding algorithms trained on it perform. And the better they perform, the less anyone needs invasive implants to get usable results out of consumer grade noninvasive devices.
But building those decoding algorithms takes a colossal amount of data annotation and training. Repetitive, tedious work that doesn’t call for advanced skills but does call for a huge amount of labor. That’s where the second mechanism kicks in, the one the big AI platforms broke in before them. When Meta, Google or OpenAI needed millions of images, texts or videos annotated to train their models, they turned to click workers in Africa, Southeast Asia or Latin America. Paid a few cents per task through platforms like Mechanical Turk or Remotasks.
Journalists have documented these practices, turning up exhausting conditions and miserable pay for mentally punishing tasks like labeling violent or pornographic content. There’s no reason to think training the AIs that decode brains will escape the same logic. If anything, the sensitivity of neural data makes it even likelier that the work happens out of sight, in countries where data protection rules don’t exist or don’t get enforced.
And precisely because all of it is sensitive, nobody shouts it from the rooftops. The companies working on neural decoding behind the scenes have zero interest in spelling out their training methods, their data sources or their deals with offshore contractors. What the public sees is Neuralink announcing that a quadriplegic plays chess with his mind, Meta presenting its neural wristband as an accessibility gadget, Apple filing patents written in the soothing language of health and wellness. What the public doesn’t see is the invisible infrastructure going up alongside, the neural databases piling up, the algorithms sharpening and the technical patents filed quietly in areas nobody is really watching yet.
So what we’re looking at today is the tip of the iceberg. The experimental implants, the fitness trackers, the patents for AirPods with EEG electrodes… all of that is the visible surface of a data accumulation and technology building process running at a completely different scale. And the day the iceberg surfaces for real, when neural reading devices get precise enough, small enough and ordinary enough to slip into everyday objects without anyone noticing, it’ll probably be too late to ask the questions we should have asked much earlier. That’s exactly what happened with social media. That’s exactly what happened with smartphones. And there’s no serious reason to think the story won’t repeat a third time.
Conclusion: act now before it’s too late
So now what? Same as always? Best case, you like this article. Even better, you share it. And then we wait… and wait some more… Meanwhile neural interfaces settle into the market. Quietly, like AI did. With no public debate and so no ethics at all. At first we’d rather treat it as a joke because it half works. Three years later nobody’s laughing, because it’s too late. So now is when we plant a big STOP sign in front of this technology. I agree that when it comes to technological servitude every red line got crossed a long time ago. But this one, decoding our thoughts, is the last border before a point of no return that leads straight to full-blown techno-fascism.
So do what you want. You can call all this science fiction nonsense. But read up on it anyway, we’ve handed you everything you need. Or you decide limits have to go up right now. In that case, the starting point is spreading the information as widely as you can. Share this article, for instance, with real motivation to open a debate that’s long overdue. You can republish it, print it… And of course, realize that you’re a media outlet too, and take this subject on so everyone can see what kind of danger is coming at us very soon. On our side, we’re not going to spare any energy exposing what these sorcerer’s apprentices are up to. But we’re not kidding ourselves, because it’s like everybody has gone completely numb about how dangerous Big Tech is. In the meantime, see you very soon for more adventures.
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