Gates-Funded Project Releases Infant MRI Scans for Gov’t AI Neuro Surveillance

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A new paper published this month in Nature’s Scientific Data reveals that researchers—working out of the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain at the University of Minnesota and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—have released MRI scans of babies as young as 1 month old into global databases for artificial intelligence training and government mega-projects.

The project is called Baby Open Brains (BOBs), described by its creators as “an open source resource of manually curated and expert reviewed infant brain segmentations.”

It compiled 71 MRI visits across 51 infants, aged 1–9 months.

The move comes as the FDA has already granted government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, and research institutions the power to take Americans’ blood, genetic data, and personal health information without consent—a parallel erosion of privacy protections that makes the mass collection of infant brain scans look less like science and more like state-backed surveillance.

It also comes as Trump’s $500 billion “Stargate” AI fast-track with Oracle, OpenAI, and Softbank centralizes unprecedented government–Big Tech power to weaponize health records and genetic data, underscoring how infant brain scans fed into federal AI pipelines could easily be folded into the same surveillance and tracking architecture.

Gates Funding and the Masonic Institute

The funding source is stated plainly in the new publication’s acknowledgments:

“This work was supported by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation INV-015711 (M.D.R., J.T.E., C.D.S., D.A.F.),” the paper reads.

The authors are based at the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain (MIDB), which was created through a $35 million endowment from Minnesota Masonic Charities.

While the paper doesn’t list Masonic Charities as a funder of this specific dataset, the infrastructure and personnel behind the project operate out of a center that only exists because of Masonic money.

Freemasonry is a secretive international fraternity that blends ritual, charity, and symbolism while fueling centuries of conspiracy theories about hidden influence and control.

Together, Gates money and Masonic influence form the twin pillars propping up this infant brain project, raising obvious questions about who really benefits from turning baby MRIs into global data.

Infant Brains Released as Public Data

The authors openly boast that they have made the dataset available worldwide:

“The BOBs dataset is available on OpenNeuro, with 71 BCP visits spanning 1–9 months of age.”

Although images were “defaced” to remove facial features, modern AI can often reconstruct identity features.

The most intimate medical data from babies is now essentially open source.

Foundation for NIH’s Federal Mega-Project

The authors admit the dataset is designed to provide the backbone for the NIH’s HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) study, a government-funded program with hundreds of millions in backing:

“These algorithms will form a necessary foundation for early-life large-scale studies such as HBCD,” the authors write.

That means data from this Gates-funded, Masonic Institute–backed project is being positioned as the infrastructure for a nationwide government brain-tracking program.

Toward Predictive Profiling of Children

The researchers connect infant brain scans to predictions about cognition and development:

“Trajectories of growth are linked to cognitive and motor outcomes at 2 years of age and… differ by sociodemographic factors and adverse birth outcomes.”

In other words, the scans are not just about anatomy.

They are the raw material for AI systems designed to predict future intelligence, motor ability, and outcomes based on early brain growth and social background.

AI Training on Baby Brains

The dataset already powered BIBSNet, a deep-learning neural network for infant MRI segmentation.

The authors emphasize its role in enabling large-scale automation:

“Automated MR processing pipelines specifically designed for early development are necessary to allow large-scale studies such as HBCD to create MR outputs unconfounded by age.”

This is the industrialization of infant brain analysis—AI designed to scan, segment, and categorize children’s brains by the thousands.

Demographic Bias Built In

The dataset is overwhelmingly narrow in representation:

“82% of the sample identifying as White, non-Hispanic and 96% of mothers having at least a college degree.”

Despite this skew, the resulting AI tools could be applied to all populations, amplifying bias and misinterpretation while influencing education, healthcare, and policy.

Surveillance by Another Name

The paper never uses the word “surveillance.”

Instead, it cloaks the project in phrases like “open science” and “benchmarks.”

But the facts are unavoidable:

• Infants under one year old are being scanned.
• Their MRIs are released globally.
• AI pipelines are being built on this data.
• The dataset feeds directly into NIH’s HBCD mega-project.
• The scans are tied to cognitive outcomes and demographics.

This is systematic monitoring and profiling of children at scale—functionally indistinguishable from surveillance, even if the authors avoid the word.

Bottom Line

The Baby Open Brains project, built out of the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain and funded by the Gates Foundation, has taken the brains of the youngest children in society and turned them into an open-source training set for AI and government profiling.

The paper frames it as a gift to science.

In reality, it is the foundation of population-level infant brain surveillance.

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