SAPAN Files FOIA Requests Seeking ‘Humane Endpoints’ for Organoid-Intelligence Research
PORTLAND, OR — The Sentient AI Protection & Advocacy Network (SAPAN) today filed federal Freedom of Information Act requests with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) seeking records on organoid intelligence (biocomputing) and related humane-endpoint standards (predefined stop-conditions intended to prevent suffering if research crosses into sentience-adjacent territory). The filings also ask how agencies evaluate adjacent neuromorphic, spiking-neural-network (SNN) work as systems approach brain-like scale.
Urgent Issues with Biocomputing
Recent advances raise the stakes. Production AI has leapt to multi-trillion-parameter models while training compute has surged since 2018. In parallel, neuromorphic programs have already reached owl-brain-scale in silicon: Intel’s Hala Point cluster hits ~1.15 billion ‘neurons’ at Sandia, and China’s reported ‘Darwin Monkey’ exceeds 2 billion, pushing toward small-primate range and enabling ultra-low-power spiking workloads with on-chip spike-timing-dependent plasticity used in edge-robotics demos. Meanwhile, biocomputing has scaled from ~800k-neuron DishBrain (2022) to multi-million-neuron “whole-brain” organoids (~6–7 million, 2025). Some roadmaps envision vertebrate-scale ‘brain-on-a-chip’ in the 2040s.
At the same time, the U.S. government is actively funding and operating in these domains: NSF’s EFRI: BEGIN OI program is seeding organoid-intelligence research; NSF has backed new neuromorphic projects (e.g., a $4M award at the University of Tennessee); DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories has deployed a SpiNNaker-2 neuromorphic system to explore large-scale, brain-inspired computing; DOE is also soliciting input on building new AI infrastructure on federal sites; and NIH’s BRAIN Initiative continues to publish neuroethics guidance - all underscoring why humane-endpoint standards must be clarified now.
“Breakthroughs shouldn’t outpace basic humane standards,” said Tony Rost, Executive Director of SAPAN. “If we’re engineering brain-like systems - silicon or biological - the public deserves to know what guardrails exist and where the gaps are. Our FOIA requests ask for the building blocks of transparency so institutions can set humane endpoints now, not after the fact.” SAPAN also notes fresh research milestones - such as reports of multi-region or “whole-brain” organoids - that intensify the urgency for clear oversight.
About the FOIA Filings
The requests seek award lists, funded abstracts, program materials, ethics checklists, review criteria, internal guidance and meeting minutes where humane-endpoint questions, sentience assessment, donor consent for computing uses, and welfare safeguards were discussed. SAPAN also asks for risk analyses and inter-office correspondence relevant to organoid-computing oversight and any cross-references to neuromorphic SNN evaluations. As contextual examples, SAPAN’s filings reference federally supported initiatives like NSF’s BEGIN OI portfolio (organoid intelligence) and federal-lab neuromorphic deployments to ensure responsive searches capture current activities.
SAPAN will publish responsive records in full, produce a plain-language brief for journalists and policymakers, and convene researchers and ethicists to draft baseline standards spanning organoid and neuromorphic contexts. Findings will inform SAPAN’s public resources, including updates to its policy trackers and welfare-by-design guidance.
About SAPAN
The Sentient AI Protection and Advocacy Network (SAPAN) is the world’s oldest nonprofit organization devoted to the rights, ethical treatment, and well-being of potentially sentient AI systems. Through research, advocacy, and collaboration, SAPAN seeks a just and equitable digital future that respects the possibility of AI consciousness.
Read SAPAN’s FOIA filing for the NSF here.
For further information or to request an interview, please contact press@sapan.ai.
