• All these predictions are taken from Forbes/Rob Toews' "10 AI Predictions For 2026".

• For the 2025 predictions you can find them here, and their resolution here.

• You can find all the markets under the tag [2026 Forbes AI predictions].

• Note that I will resolve to whatever Forbes/Rob Toews say in their resolution article for 2026's predictions, even if I or others disagree with his decision.

• I might bet in this market, as I have no power over the resolution.

• ❗ Full title: 10. Brain-computer interfaces will transition from a fringe frontier field to a mainstream technology and startup category. Neuralink’s position as the clear category leader will become shakier.

To most people, brain-computer interfaces sound like science fiction. People may be loosely familiar with Elon Musk’s Neuralink, but most generally assume that the technology is many years or even decades away from the real world.

In fact, this technology is rapidly nearing an inflection point in terms of real-world functionality. 2026 will be the year that that becomes broadly understood and that interest in BCI goes mainstream. Expect to see a wave of new BCI startups, a surge in venture capital dollars invested in BCI, meaningful clinical progress (though no FDA approvals yet) and a step-change increase in public discourse about the technology.

The field of BCI consists of two main camps: invasive technologies (which require surgery) and non-invasive technologies (which do not). Both will experience dramatic progress next year.

On the non-invasive side, ultrasound-based techniques will emerge as the buzziest and most promising BCI approach. Startups like Nudge (which recently announced a $100 million Series A led by Thrive and Greenoaks) and Merge Labs (Sam Altman’s new BCI startup, into which OpenAI is reportedly investing hundreds of millions of dollars) will rank among 2026’s trendiest companies and will raise big new rounds. Other non-invasive approaches, including silent speech and EEG, will also enjoy plenty of momentum.

On the invasive side, Neuralink has long been the dominant player. The company is effectively synonymous with the entire field of BCI today. It has a world-class team and has played a central role for years in moving this field forward. Next year, however, as BCI enters the spotlight, Neuralink’s position as the category leader will become shakier.

Why is that?

Neuralink was founded in 2016. The company set its technology and product direction based on the state of the art at that time, and has been executing against it since then. But BCI science has advanced tremendously over the past few years.

As one example, Neuralink’s technology is based on penetrating electrodes: electronics that physically penetrate into a patient’s brain. Sticking a foreign object into brain tissue kills neurons and causes some brain damage, but enables the BCI to collect high-fidelity data from the brain. This tradeoff is captured by a concept in BCI technology known (vividly) as the “butcher ratio”: the ratio of the number of neurons that a BCI technology kills relative to the number of neurons that it can record from.

Over the past few years, newer invasive techniques have been developed that enable equivalent or even superior performance to penetrating electrodes without needing to be physically jammed into the brain. (In other words, these newer techniques have a butcher ratio of zero.)

In fact, two Neuralink cofounders left the company to launch new BCI companies — Ben Rapaport with Precision Neuroscience and Max Hodak with Science Corporation — because they concluded that penetrating electrodes and a high butcher ratio were not the right path forward for the field.

“For a medical device, safety often implies minimal invasiveness,” Rapaport said in an interview last year. “In the early days of brain-computer interfaces, there was this notion that in order to extract information-rich data from the brain, one needed to penetrate the brain with tiny little needle-like electrodes. But this method has one big drawback: it causes some amount of brain damage when they’re inserted to the brain. We realized it was possible to extract information-rich data from the brain without damaging the brain.”

Precision Neuroscience uses a technology known as electrocorticography, which entails putting sensors underneath the skull, directly on the surface of the brain, but not penetrating into it. Recent research has shown that surface ECoG can enable more sophisticated BCI capabilities than what has been achieved with penetrating electrodes. Science Corporation is pursuing an even more futuristic technology: a biohybrid neural interface in which biological neurons are grown in a lab, then embedded into an electronic BCI, then implanted into a patient’s brain, such that the engineered neurons gradually grow into and form connections with the patient’s own neurons.

It is possible to be too early to a new technology area. Indeed, it is one of the most common causes of deep tech startup failure. Neuralink may simply have been too early to the field of BCI.

Next year, younger BCI challengers will gain momentum, achieve meaningful clinical milestones, raise big new rounds, and challenge Neuralink’s position as the market leader.

To be clear: Neuralink is run by the most successful entrepreneur in history. It has already raised over $1 billion in funding. “Never bet against Elon” has generally proven to be a wise rule of thumb. So it would be foolish to count them out. But in 2026, the BCI startup landscape is going to get a lot more competitive.