Can anyone knowledgeable interpret what was actually done here? It doesn't sound like "performed brain surgery" is accurate.

> Watching our surgeon do the craniotomy, which the agent is not allowed to do yet for safety reasons

I think the only action it took was sending commands to lower a needle to a certain location, inject, and then remove it. But then it sounds like it couldn't actually choose a valid location and this guy had to manually override it? Maybe I'm misunderstanding, talking about this post: https://x.com/OcanaSantero/status/2115442968874139867 (https://xxcancel.com/OcanaSantero/status/2115442968874139867).

I know there is always endless goalpost-moving in these kind of discussions but I really do think there's an important difference between "performed brain surgery" and "observed brain surgery and ran inject(3.9, 4, 4.3) at one point". And there's also no discussion here of whether this decision made any medical sense and what impact it had on the mouse besides not killing it.

From my reading of it, the override moment was because they made a coding error which cause manual adjustment to de-sync the arm position, the agent correctly refused to continue when it noticed that.

It does seem like there is minimal "surgery" involved but it's not much of a stretch. If a surgeon took the same steps but someone else opened the skull, it would still be considered 'brain surgery', I think.

Who made the coding error?

Yeesh. Claude still does that? I haven't had that problem since GPT 5.

Are you being sarcastic? I genuinely cannot tell.

Very different but made me think of a recent personal story.

My father-in-law had an eye accident when he was young, and the doctor at the time said "unfortunately I don't recommend you try surgery, there's a really high risk you go blind".

Fast forward to today, and 40 years later such doctor called him and said "hey, turns out we could do a cornea transplant and surgery today and you have really high chances of success!"

He then went to do the surgery and now has restored his vision fully. He said the surgery was very "robotic" as in there's this super high precision device that does incredible work.

I don't think OP is mentioning the same doctor 40 years later. They mention "such" doctor:

"ast forward to today, and 40 years later such doctor called him and said"

no, it was in fact the same doctor, he is really old now, that said it wasn't the same one who ended up performing the surgery

yeah our family was actually quite happy he called in to follow up, I thought that was the most beautiful thing

This was an unnecessary experiment that was only done a live mouse (vs a simulation) for the attention grabbing effect.

Obviously an AI agent can perform a simple surgical procedure. The question is how to get it to perform reliably.

The reason AI agents work as well as they do with code is because they get feedback and retry in a loop. Surgery is inherently inflicting “harm” on a patient, so there’s no bright line guardrail to apply to the agent loop.

Agents performing surgery won’t be possible until models get much much more reliable or we develop a simulation that matches reality close enough that we can use that in realtime for their feedback loop. I think we’re likely very far off from either solution.

I felt scared for the little guy. Somehow Opus 5 refusing after understanding its limitations felt like the most humane thing in the article.

It's an industrial part made for use on much scarier machines.

It's a cheap imitation of one; a toy. Use it when you're helping your kid build a spaceship out of cardboard. If you want one that has actual electrical and temperature ratings beyond that of "survives shipping to Amazon Prime member" you should probably break out the McMaster catalog.

Also it isn't mounted on a panel. You'll go to slap it and it will just tip over instead of being pressed.

This is fascinating and scary at the same time. I dread the future when people will have access to cheaper health insurance with the caveat that all consultations and procedures will be performed solely by AI. Want a human? Pay extra.

This is already happening though, to a point; recently, local GPs have been subsumed into larger health care provider companies, and they have set up systems so that before you can make an appointment, you need to go through a wizard and / or chat interface. Likewise, people are encouraged to go to a website and do some self-diagnosis before calling a doctor - things like "if you have a fever, how high is it and for how long have you had it?"

It's indirectly related to health insurance cost, as we have a GP shortage and they (I presume?) realized a lot of people are making appointments and wasting a GP's time for trivialties like a cough or cold.

I'm pretty sure they already have, or are experimenting with having people go through an AI chatbot first. This is already very much a thing with any kind of customer support. It's not a new development though, the preceding generation was conversational interfaces.

I have already given up the idea of getting heath care. I have top-shelf insurance that has all the preventative stuff included, but it is simply not worth the effort. The quality of care is not even worth my co-pay.

I am looking forward to it! Right now we get doctors who are "qualified", but take you after 20 hour shift with no sleep, and do not even speak fluently in the same language as patient.

And this is on VERY expensive state helath insurance!!!

I imagine human consultation could be more expensive, at least in the US, due to liability of human error. Especially if/when AI capabilities in medical procedures becomes clearly superior.

Where can you get superior AI surgery currently?

Humans are irrational. We also value "feeling" safe. Some tricks sell the illusion for those people who can't trust 100% some technologies.

Of course I trust engineering, I know planes are safe: but when there is turbulance and I see a flight attendant just casually walking and not even reacting to it, I feel better.

Humans are still humans.

Of course, culture changes. Colective ideas and institutions adapt. But extremely slowly compared to advances in tech.

For those of us that loathe these kinds of stories being posted on X, this is also being reported on by several outlets.

Here's a Wired link: https://www.wired.com/story/an-ai-agent-did-brain-surgery-on-live-mouse

I don’t understand why would anyone consider this as an ethical experiment

It’s a mouse. If you think feeding one to a snake is ethical, then it’s a little strange this would be unethical. At least the human has the mouse’s wellbeing at heart.

That’s not quite equivalent. For one, a responsible owner is not feeding live mice to a snake. There’s at least an opportunity to ethically euthanize the mice prior to the act.

> At least the human has the mouse’s wellbeing at heart.

You don’t know this to be true

Lots of owners feed fully aware "live" prey. Many snakes will refuse prey that doesn't move.

And this is considered really creepy and weird by many people.

Not saying that this resolves the broader issue, but I'm not aware of any vegetarian snakes. It seems possible to differentiate this from animal experimentation.

It’s the process that’s unethical, not the outcome. The ends cannot justify the means in the scientific process.

At which point from testing with non-animals do you go from simulated surgeries with robots to actual surgeries though? I don't want it being done unethically, but how do you promote the effort / research ethically?

What is unethical about the process of using emerging technology in medical procedures?

This is not a test or experiment by any measure. Someone is playing around with claude using a living animal.

At the risk of being a pedant, was this not literally a test to see if Claude could/would determine and then take the appropriate steps in administering an injection?

With a veterinarian conducting part of the procedure and overseeing the rest of it, and the mouse reportedly making a decent recovery, I fail to see a lapse in ethics.

I've considered the potential harm versus the realities of medical science and study.

Starting on epileptic mice versus humans seems like a reasonable starting point.

You're failing to identify any actual ethical issue beside a blanket problem with animal testing. Which I can partially agree with as there's plenty of needless abuse and inhumane treatment.

This specific case does not seem like that.

How much issue do you take with animal testing in the rest of medicine? We already, more or less, torture an unfathomable amount of animals to get where we are.

I take great issue with animal testing. I find that unethical too.

It seems to me that ethics evolve to suit the process, and not the other way.

Did they start with brain surgery or did they warm up on less consequential things like stitches?

Oh well, when we talk about animal cruelty, the paradoxes of what groups of humans think is ethical is mind bending. Because humans (most of them), love to eat meat or use animal products and don't really care where it comes from.

It's a deep subject.

That ship sailed a long time ago. Science decided that killing mice for experiments (regardless of the experiment) is fine. In fact, a large amount of the mice killed are just redundant (not needed for a particular experiment)

The mouse survived!

I noticed that the first tweet made no mention if the mouse survived. Seemed a little...sus.

For the mouse sake probably not as the mouse will not be freed and no longer subjected to experiments. From the perspective of the success of this AI surgery it's likely important that the mouse survived.

Feels like on boundary of surgery (injecting as opposed to cutting, moving, sowing, etc.) - but maybe I am missing something.

https://xxcancel.com/OcanaSantero/status/2115442964574908902

Very interesting.

Will we just throw LLMs at most problems in the future instead of smaller, custom models? Like Sonnet 5.5 in this case.

What does the approval process look like here? The company website associated with the account fails to load, Exin Therapeutics

I would feel more comfortable if the agent wrote the software to do the surgery rather than did it itself, so that it can be vetted before deployment. And if a complication arose, to stop and defer to the surgeon (would that work?)

If only we had accurate models they could train on.