Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston

No, we haven't uploaded a fly yet.

By Ariel Zalesnikow-Johnston.

Published on March 19, 2026.

In the last two weeks, social media was set abuzz by claims that scientists had succeeded in uploading a fruit fly.

It started with a video released by the startup Eon Systems, a company that wants to create brain emulation so humans can flourish in a world with superintelligence.

On the left of the video, a virtual fly walks around in a sampit looking for pieces of banana to eat, occasionally pausing to groom itself along the way.

On the right is a dancing constellation of dots resembling the fruit fly brain, set above the captioned simultaneous brain emulation.

At first glance, this appears astounding, a digitally recreated animal living its life inside a computer.

And indeed, this impression was seemingly confirmed when, a couple of days after the video's initial release on X by co-founder Alex Wisnergross, Eon CEO Michael Andreg explicitly posted, we've uploaded a fruit fly.

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Yet extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, not just cool visuals, as one neuroscientist put it in response to Andregg's post.

If Eon had indeed succeeded in uploading a fly, a goal previously thought to be likely decades away according to much of the fly neuroscience community, they'd need more than a video to prove it.

Did the upload show evidence of known neurophysiological markers of working memory, such as the head direction ring attractor bump?

How did their brain model actually control the virtual fly body, given it seemed to lack a modelled spinal cord?

Where was the data and the write-up?

Because if E.ON couldn't back up what their video seemed to show, at least some neuroscientists were going to be markedly less than impressed.

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Eon did follow up with a blog post, how the Eon team produced a virtual embodied fly, detailing how they combined pre-existing models of the fly brain and body into a system that could respond to virtual environmental cues.

But for the neuroscientists scrutinizing the uploading claim, these details only sharpened their objections, so much so that some are accusing Eon of misleading conduct and gross misrepresentation.