GoKawiilIn 2020, face-recognition firm Clearview AI became infamous for scraping more than 3 billion photos from the internet to turn faces into names for police and security professionals. Now the company is experimenting with trawling the web again, this time using AI to potentially help law enforcement fill in the person behind the name—who they are, who they know, where they live, and what they’ve left behind online.
Clearview has quietly built and tested what it describes as an experimental AI “analyst assistant,” WIRED has learned. Called InquiryIQ, the unreleased tool is designed to take details an investigator unearths from a Clearview search and then automatically fan out across the web—opening webpages, analyzing images, and assembling what it finds into a profile containing the possible employers, aliases, associates, and physical characteristics of a person police are investigating.
InquiryIQ’s interface states that supplying age, gender, and race can help the system make “smarter decisions” as it searches, according to code for the tool analyzed by WIRED. One of the models that the company tested to power those decisions comes from SpaceXAI, the Elon Musk company behind Grok. (SpaceX and xAI merged in February.) Musk has pitched Grok as an alternative to supposedly “woke” AI systems, and the chatbot has repeatedly drawn scrutiny for racist, extremist, and inflammatory outputs. It is unclear how SpaceXAI would use those demographic inputs or how they might shape its output, and Clearview declined to speculate.
Experts say InquiryIQ and tools like it could reshape police investigations by compressing days or weeks of detective work into minutes. That speed could help police solve crimes faster, but it also lowers the cost of fishing expeditions, making it practical to scrutinize people police might otherwise never have investigated. And because generative AI can produce different answers from the same starting point, they say, it may be difficult to reconstruct why the system pursued one lead instead of another.
Clearview tells WIRED that InquiryIQ is a prototype that has never been pitched or shipped to customers and is not currently planned for release in its present form. The company also disputes that the tool amounts to an automated investigator. Instead, it describes InquiryIQ as a limited way to automate the web searches detectives already perform. In an interview, CEO Amos Kyler says the SpaceXAI and other model options visible in the interface were included so Clearview’s engineers could compare how different models performed during testing, not so police could choose which model ran the research. “No law enforcement user has ever used it, period,” Kyler says.
WIRED discovered InquiryIQ in files that Clearview’s login page sends to any visitor’s browser before they sign in. It was the same technique WIRED used last month to uncover OS Investigate, an AI-powered search tool being developed by Flock Safety, and to reconstruct a mock-up of its interface from publicly accessible files.
Clearview’s files similarly contain code and thousands of lines of text for its user interface—instructions, warnings, and feature descriptions that show how the company has designed and described InquiryIQ. They do not reveal exactly what happens inside Clearview’s servers, how well the tool works, or who has used it. According to the text, InquiryIQ is built to “automatically discover and enrich personal data from web sources.”
Clearview says the apparent completeness of InquiryIQ’s interface should not be mistaken for a product nearing release. Modern AI tools have made it much faster to build sophisticated prototypes, the company says, and the directive to Clearview’s engineers is to move prototypes along rapidly because it’s now possible to do so.