Clearview AI Is Testing an AI Tool That Would Let Cops Unearth Your Life Online
wired ·
Clearview AI, the face-recognition company known for scraping billions of online photos, has quietly built and tested an experimental AI tool called InquiryIQ that WIRED discovered through files its login page sends to visitors' browsers. The unreleased tool is designed to take details from a Clearview search and automatically fan out across the web, opening pages, analyzing images, and assembling a profile of possible employers, aliases, associates, addresses, phone numbers, social media accounts, and arrest history. Its interface indicates that supplying age, gender, and race can help the system make "smarter decisions," and one model tested to power it came from xAI, the Elon Musk company behind Grok. Clearview says InquiryIQ is a prototype never pitched or shipped to customers and disputes that it amounts to an automated investigator, describing it instead as a limited way to automate searches detectives already do; CEO Amos Kyler says no law enforcement user has ever used it. Experts warn that such tools compress days or weeks of detective work into minutes, lowering the cost of fishing expeditions and making it hard to reconstruct why the system pursued one lead over another. Privacy scholar Woodrow Hartzog argues that the labor of investigation once acted as a practical check on surveillance, and that human review may become a rubber stamp over time; defense attorneys raise similar concerns about reliance on generative AI prone to hallucination.
wired