• Some threads in Neuralink’s first human brain implant came loose, but the problem has been fixed.

• The Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk’s company was considering removing the patient’s chip.

• The Journal also reported that Neuralink plans to implant ten more devices in humans this year.

Neuralink’s brain chip implant works – but some of the device’s threads have come loose from the brain of the first human patient.

Elon Musk’s company released a progress update in a blog post on Wednesday, saying that several weeks after the surgery, several fibers from the patient’s brain had “retracted,” making the implant less effective.

The device, called Link, allows the patient to move a computer cursor using their thoughts. A previous blog post said the device includes over 1,000 electrodes and at least 64 threads, each thinner than a human hair.

Neuralink measures the speed and accuracy of the Link’s cursor control using a metric called bits per second. In Wednesday’s blog post, it said a higher BPS value means stronger cursor control.

Pulling back some of the threads caused the electrodes in the device to be less effective, Neuralink said. The company said it has since made optimizations that in turn “produced rapid and sustained improvement in BPS that now exceeds Noland’s initial performance.”

Neuralink announced in a livestream on X in March that 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh, who was paralyzed below the shoulders after a diving accident in 2016, was the first person to receive the implant in January.

The Wall Street Journal reported, citing unnamed sources, that Neuralink was considering removing the patient’s implant entirely.

In February, Musk said at a X-space session that “progress is good” and that “the patient appears to have fully recovered.”

On Thursday he posted on X:

The Journal reported that Neuralink plans to implant 10 devices in other patients by the end of this year.

At a meeting at Neuralink shared on X In March, Arbaugh said it took five months from applying to participate in Neuralink’s human trials to the brain surgery, which took less than two hours. Since the implant, he has used it to play video games such as “Mario Kart,” post on social media and play chess.

Neuralink did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider outside of normal business hours.

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