If this was something they knew could happen, why didn’t they prepare the patient so he’d know what to expect? Informing the patient of what can go wrong is an important step in even routine surgery, let alone experimentation.

Moreover, it would have blunted this exact criticism if they were simply to say, “yes, this is something we expected from our trials but we specifically chose this depth to start with for these reasons”.

The actual blog post only mentions the thread retraction in passing: https://neuralink.com/blog/prime-study-progress-update-user-experience/