Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc pulled into a story no driver expects to see in their mirrors this week, named among a group of elite athletes whose brainwave data was allegedly harvested by a Chinese-backed neurotech firm for potential military use. The company at the centre, BrainCo, has rejected the claims as “unsubstantiated speculation.”
The allegations come via investigative outlet Hunterbrook and journalist Pablo Torre, who report that BrainCo — a neurotechnology outfit spun out of Harvard in 2015 — has worked with entities tied to China’s defense ecosystem while collecting neural data from top-level performers. The list cited includes Leclerc, tennis world No. 2 Jannik Sinner, athletes from Italy’s national Olympic squads, Manchester City players and members of Team USA.
The device in question is FocusCalm, a headband used across sports to train focus and reduce stress through neurofeedback — the sort of mental conditioning aides that have quietly made their way into Formula 1 as drivers chase marginal gains away from the cockpit. The headband captures brainwave activity, which is then analyzed to drive training programs.
According to Dr. Riccardo Ceccarelli, the long-time F1 performance specialist behind Formula Medicine and one of BrainCo’s most prominent customers, the athletes’ brain data is saved to the cloud. That’s where the concerns begin: Hunterbrook’s report argues that even if the data wasn’t gathered with any defense purpose in mind, its value grows as AI improves — and so does the risk profile.
Duke University’s Professor Nita Farahany underscored that point, telling Hunterbrook that what once looked like noise “can now be part of the signal.” She added that older raw data could be reprocessed with modern AI to decode more than was possible at the time. “You should never look at technology in isolation,” Farahany said. “China’s investment in BCI [brain-computer interface] together with cognitive warfare together with humanoid robots — this is a huge play.”
BrainCo flatly denies any military collaboration. A company spokesperson said all data is “purged from the application at the conclusion of each use” and that BrainCo has “implemented stringent compliance measures” prohibiting customers from using or transferring its technology to restricted end users or for military applications. The company declined to answer follow-up questions, accusing Hunterbrook of mischaracterizing its work and mission.
The Hunterbrook report also points to BrainCo’s links with three of China’s so‑called “Seven Sons of National Defense,” universities whose students have previously faced U.S. restrictions because of alleged military ties. That’s fueled fears that athlete neurodata — gathered for performance training — may have been exposed to a pipeline far beyond sport.
To be clear: no athlete, including Leclerc, is accused of wrongdoing. The claims target the custodianship and end use of the data, not the individuals who wore the hardware in good faith as part of cutting-edge training programs. In a sport where teams lock down everything from car schematics to heart-rate telemetry, the idea that brain data could be floating around in a grey zone is unsettling.
The broader context matters. F1 has lived at the frontier of data for decades, but most of that data stays under strict layers of governance — FIA technical regulations, team security protocols, and contracts that would make a defense contractor blush. Neuroscience tools sit outside that technical rulebook. They’re personal, often third-party, and cross borders without scrutineers or parc fermé. That’s precisely why this story bites: it collides performance innovation with geopolitics and a fast-evolving AI landscape.
Expect teams and athlete managers to comb through vendor agreements and data-handling clauses in the coming weeks. Even if BrainCo’s processes satisfy its own compliance checklist, the optics alone will prompt lawyers and performance chiefs to ask harder questions about where “training data” goes, who can access it, and how long it truly lives on a server.
As for BrainCo, its stance is unequivocal: no military use, no retained data, and no tolerance for what it calls erroneous allegations. For now, that’s where things rest — allegations on one side, denials on the other, and a sport suddenly staring at a new category of risk it can’t quantify on a timing screen.
In the meantime, this episode is a reminder that the line between the paddock and the wider world is fading. Brain-computer interfaces, AI-enabled decoding, cognitive warfare — it all sounds sci‑fi until it lands in an athlete’s kit bag. F1 is used to living on the edge of innovation. It may now have to write a few new rules for what happens inside a driver’s head, too.
