Part of the techno-elite is starting to frame embryo selection and future heritable editing as a way to catch up with superintelligence

Part of the techno-elite is starting to frame embryo selection and future heritable editing as a way to catch up with superintelligence

On April 16, Mother Jones published a major investigation into how former MIRI researcher Tsvi Benson-Tilsen, the Berkeley Genomics Project, and a circle of affiliated investors are tying fear of AGI to the market for "enhanced children." This is where embryo selection, talk of future heritable editing, and money from people invested in both AI and genomics startups come together.

AGI is artificial general intelligence: a general-purpose system able to solve a wide range of tasks at the human level or beyond. In AI-risk circles, the fear is framed like this: the next step is that such a system becomes superhuman, humans stop understanding its goals, and lose control. Benson-Tilsen spent seven years at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute trying to solve exactly that problem. According to Mother Jones, he concluded that he himself was not capable of solving it, and that others have not managed it yet either.

His answer is now biological. At the end of 2024, he launched the Berkeley Genomics Project. The project's website states its mission plainly: to open the way to safe and affordable heritable genome engineering, meaning changes to DNA in an embryo or reproductive cells that would be passed on not only to the child, but to that child's descendants as well. Among the promised benefits it lists protection from disease, protection from severe mental disorders, longer life and more healthy years, and "a more capable mind." It also spells out the political extension of that vision: the United States should lead in this technology.

It is important here to separate two things. Today, the market mainly sells embryo selection: during IVF, several embryos are created, their DNA is tested, and parents are helped to choose one for transfer. For some severe inherited diseases, that kind of testing is straightforward. For complex traits like intelligence, the case is far weaker. They depend on many genes, but also on environment, nutrition, family, and schooling. A 2019 estimate in Cell put the average expected gain from choosing among five embryos at about 2.5 IQ points. That is not much. The SAT ancestors story showed how quickly talk about "innate ability" starts to confuse heredity with language, schooling, and environment. The market is still nowhere near full-scale "engineering of geniuses."

But the language around the field has already moved far beyond the practice. In his post on X, Brian Armstrong described the IVF clinic of the future as a "Gattaca stack":

"The IVF clinic of the future will combine several technologies: egg production from skin or blood, selection of the embryo that best matches the parents' request, ideally from thousands of options, embryo editing for disease prevention or enhancements, and artificial wombs."

That formula bundles an entire pipeline. First, egg cells are made from skin or blood cells. Then many embryos are created. Then they are compared by genetic probabilities, one is selected, additional edits are made, and the pregnancy is carried in an artificial womb. And the artificial womb is already being assembled piece by piece: there are embryo models, an artificial placenta, and a sealed environment for fetal development outside the body. A whole package of controversial technologies is already being presented here as a single product roadmap.

That is exactly why this is no longer just a debate about fertility or the prevention of rare diseases. The same techno-elite networks are simultaneously amplifying the AGI agenda, funding AI, and starting to justify heritable human upgrades as a response to the risk posed by those systems. Yesterday, the market was selling wealthy parents a slightly more advantageous choice between embryos, and we already published a separate analysis of that. Now a new political language is being built on top of the same practice: not just an expensive reproductive service for the rich, but preparation of "better" people for a post-AGI world.

The question is no longer whether yet another expensive genetic service should be allowed. The question is who gets the right to rewrite heritable human traits, by what criteria a future child will be judged "better," and why the techno-elite has decided that fear of superintelligence justifies redesigning children and declaring that race a matter of national leadership.