Neuralink's mass production milestone ignores the 1976 patent
The blog post breaking this down walks through the claims line by line. Claim 1: "apparatus for monitoring brain waves... comprising a transmitter... a receiver... and a power supply..." — that's the N1 implant in broad strokes. Claim 7 adds stimulation capability. The patent expired in 1996, which means the core IP has been public domain for nearly three decades. Neuralink's real innovation isn't the concept; it's the electrode density (1,024 channels across 64 threads), the surgical robot, and the hermetic packaging that survives years inside a skull. Those are engineering wins, not fundamental IP.
What's fascinating is how the Malech design anticipated the power problem. No battery — just an external RF coil coupling through tissue. Neuralink went with an internal rechargeable cell instead, which gives patient mobility but adds failure modes: battery degradation, thermal limits, recharge compliance. Malech's approach trades convenience for longevity. Modern materials might make his inductive scheme viable again — gallium nitride rectifiers, thin-film capacitors, biocompatible ferrites — but nobody's revisiting it because the patent expired and the prior art is "solved."
DARPA's N3 program (Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology) is currently funding optical, acoustic, and magnetic approaches that skip implants entirely. Meanwhile Neuralink is shipping the invasive version at scale. The regulatory path they've cleared — FDA Breakthrough Device, IDE approval, first-in-human — is arguably more valuable than any patent. That's the moat: not the idea, but the safety dossier.
The Malech patent is a reminder that BCI isn't a 2020s invention. It's a half-century engineering slog. Neuralink deserves credit for turning lab demos into a manufacturable medical device. But the next time someone calls it "unprecedented," pull up US 3,951,134. The future was patented before most of us were born.