David Kirouac-Imagn Images / Robert Deutsch-Imagn Images / Michael Madrid-Imagn Images
Chinese company BrainCo, which makes FocusCalm headbands, has been accused of stealing top athletes’ brain data for use by the communist country’s military. FocusCalm is a focus-training headband that records athletes’ brainwaves. These accusations were brought to light after a six-month joint investigation conducted by Hunterbrook Media and journalist Pablo Torre.
FocusCalm headbands have been used by Formula 1 driver Charles Leclerc, tennis aces Jannik Sinner and Iga Swiatek, American skier Mikaela Shiffrin, U.S. and Italian Olympic teams, Manchester City soccer players, and Super Bowl champion Logan Ryan, a former BrainCo spokesperson.
According to Hunterbrook Media, BrainCo brands itself as a Harvard-founded company that started in 2015. However, it “has been quietly backed by Chinese government-linked entities for nearly a decade.” China Electronics Corp., which the U.S. government calls a “Chinese military company operating in the United States,” has reportedly funded BrainCo since around 2017. In addition to that, the Chinese government has “apparently” directly invested “tens of millions of dollars” in BrainCo over the years.
“In recent years, BrainCo has largely shut down its U.S. operation,” Hunterbrook’s Sam Koppelman explained. “Moved to China where it’s now going public at that $1.3 billion valuation, and it has quietly become one of the most important companies in the world to the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”
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Dr. Riccardo Ceccarelli of Formula Medicine, a longtime client of BrainCo, said China could be using the brainwave data to train its own athletes. BrainCo, however, also reportedly has ties to China’s military.
“Named one of the ‘Six Little Dragons‘ alongside China’s tech champions like AI leader DeepSeek, BrainCo has integrated its technology directly into humanoid robots made by fellow Little Dragon Unitree — a company that Congress has warned is a tool of China’s People’s Liberation Army,” Hunterbrook Media wrote in a lengthy article about the investigation.
“BrainCo has also cooperated with at least three of the ‘Seven Sons of National Defense,’ Chinese universities whose graduate students were barred in 2020 from U.S. graduate programs because of their close ties to the military establishment. BrainCo denied any collaboration with the Chinese military, but declined to answer Hunterbrook questions regarding its ties to defense contractors or the Chinese Communist Party.”
Duke University professor Nita Farahany, who wrote a book on brain-computer interface technology, warned, “For the skeptics out there I think it is very likely that the CCP is using brain data to try to better understand how our athletes perform to better train for future soldiers, to become part of an overall program that they’ve been developing around cognitive warfare.”