The Body in the Box: How Cortical Labs Turned Science Fiction into a $35,000 Product

For decades, science fiction has been obsessed with one particular yearning: artificial intelligence seeking embodiment. From the replicants of “Blade Runner” to the disembodied minds of “Neuromancer” desperate for flesh, from the hosts of “Westworld” craving real-world sensation to the cyborgs of “Ghost in the Shell” blurring the boundary between code and cortex: the story is always the same. Pure intelligence, trapped in silicon or servers, hungers for a body. A biological avatar. Something “alive.”

We used to call that fantasy. Now we call it a product.

In March 2025, the Australian startup Cortical Labs quietly launched the CL1: the world’s first commercially available biological computer. For $35,000, you can purchase a shoebox-sized device containing roughly 800,000 lab-grown human neurons; cells reprogrammed from adult donor blood or skin samples; grown directly onto a silicon chip. These aren’t simulations or neuromorphic circuits mimicking brain behavior. They are living human neurons, sustained by an onboard life-support system that regulates nutrients, temperature, waste, and gases. The neurons stay viable for up to six months. You plug in power, connect peripherals if you want (cameras, actuators, USB devices), and deploy code to them. The system listens to their electrical activity, sends stimuli in response, and the network adapts in real time.

Cortical Labs calls this “synthetic biological intelligence” (SBI) and runs it through their proprietary Biological Intelligence Operating System (biOS). The neurons form dynamic, plastic networks that learn through feedback loops; much like the 2022 DishBrain experiment where a simpler dish of neurons famously learned to play Pong. But the CL1 scales that up, makes it programmable, stackable, and available to labs worldwide. If you don’t have the facilities or the cash for a full unit, there’s “Wetware-as-a-Service:” remote cloud access to their neuron cultures for a weekly fee.

This isn’t a gimmick for futurists. The primary market is biomedical research. The CL1 offers an ethically cleaner alternative to animal testing; real human neurons reacting to compounds in real time, modeling disease states, screening drugs, or exploring how brains process information without harming sentient animals. It’s also positioned as a complement to traditional AI: biological networks are extraordinarily energy-efficient (a rack of CL1s draws 850–1,000 watts, a fraction of what large language models demand), learn from far less data, and exhibit genuine adaptability rather than statistical pattern-matching.

And yet the implications go far beyond drug discovery. They touch something deeper: anthropological and almost philosophical.

Intelligence has always been embodied. Cognitive science has argued for decades that abstract reasoning alone isn’t enough; true understanding emerges from interaction with a physical world through a body. Disembodied AI excels at chess, translation, and generating text, but it lacks the grounded, sensorimotor intuition that even a toddler possesses. The CL1 literalizes that insight: instead of building robots with silicon brains, we’re giving computation a biological substrate. The “brain” isn’t emulated: “it’s grown.” The hardware isn’t separate from the wetware; the two are fused.

What does it mean when a company can sell you a living neural network? When intelligence isn’t simulated but cultivated? When the line between tool and organism begins to dissolve? We’re no longer in the realm of metaphor. This is business. It’s on the website. You can buy it, plug it in, and watch neurons learn.

The CL1 won’t replace GPUs tomorrow. Its neurons die after half a year; scaling to billions of cells remains a distant goal; ethical oversight is mandatory. But it marks a pivot. The old story of AI yearning for a body is being rewritten. We’re not waiting for machines to evolve toward biology. We’re engineering biology toward computation.

Science fiction asked what happens when intelligence escapes the digital cage. The answer, so far, is that we open the cage ourselves, and charge admission. Be sure to explore more articles on Business Anthropology’s Blog, as well as “The Making and Unmaking of the Modern World” available on Amazon.

References

- Cortical Labs official CL1 page: https://corticallabs.com/cl1

- Cortical Labs homepage: https://corticallabs.com/

- Forbes article, “Hardware, Software, Meet Wetware: A Computer With 800,000 Human Neurons” (June 4, 2025): https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2025/06/04/hardware-software-meet-wetware-a-computer-with-800000-human-neurons/

- IEEE Spectrum, “Biological Computer: Human Brain Cells on a Chip” (June 3, 2025): https://spectrum.ieee.org/biological-computer-for-sale

- New Atlas, “World’s first ‘Synthetic Biological Intelligence’ runs on living human cells” (March 24, 2025): https://newatlas.com/brain/cortical-bioengineered-intelligence

- BioPharmaTrend, “Cortical Labs Launches $35K Biological Computer Built on Human Brain Cells” (March 4, 2025): https://www.biopharmatrend.com/news/cortical-labs-introduces-biological-computer-built-on-human-brain-cells-1156