In the glass-walled boardrooms and billion-dollar kitchens of Silicon Valley, a new obsession is taking root—designing children for brilliance. Not just healthy, not just happy, but armed from birth with genetic advantages meant to push them toward the top of the intellectual food chain.

Forget private tutors and coding camps. This is next-level parental ambition: paying tens of thousands of dollars to screen embryos for traits like IQ, or even hiring high-end matchmakers whose client lists look like an Ivy League reunion. The goal? To create children primed for elite universities, cutting-edge problem-solving, and—if you believe the true believers—saving humanity from the very technologies their parents are building.

Tsvi Benson-Tilsen, a mathematician who once tried to outwit rogue artificial intelligence, has given up on that mission for now. His new project? Boosting the genetic odds that tomorrow’s humans will be smart enough to fix the mess we’re in. “My intuition is it’s one of our best hopes,” he says, as if designing a sharper species is simply another Silicon Valley moonshot.

The market has responded. Startups like Nucleus Genomics and Herasight now offer embryo IQ predictions—costing anywhere from $6,000 to $50,000—to couples already navigating the costly, invasive process of IVF. Some of these parents are venture capitalists, software engineers, and pronatalist activists who openly treat embryo selection as a kind of intellectual portfolio management: weigh the risk of Alzheimer’s against the gain of 10 IQ points, calculate the tradeoffs, pick the embryo with the best score.

To critics, it’s a slippery slope toward a genetically gated elite. To the participants, it’s an investment in human potential. Matchmaker Jennifer Donnelly, whose clients pay up to $500,000 for introductions, puts it bluntly: “They aren’t just thinking about love—they’re thinking about genetics, the educational outcomes, and the legacy.”

Bioethicists warn that the science is still crude—current genetic models explain maybe 5–10% of intelligence differences, and you could accidentally boost the risk of autism while chasing IQ gains. But in a culture that already measures toddlers by test scores and preschools by admissions data, these nuances aren’t slowing down the pioneers.

And for some, it’s not just about winning the education game. A subset of Berkeley’s “rationalists” are pursuing smarter babies as a long-term defense against AI catastrophe. In their worldview, the only way to make safe machines is to first make safer—and smarter—humans.

Whether this will produce a generation of philosopher-engineers or just an expensive genetic fad is still an open question. What’s certain is that Silicon Valley’s most audacious minds have decided that if they can’t save the world themselves, they’ll try to give birth to someone who can.

Related Stories:

• The Ethics of Designer Babies in the Age of Gene Editing
• Inside the Pronatalist Movement’s Push for More “High-Value” Children