Facial recognition company Clearview AI has quietly developed and tested an experimental AI tool designed to automatically compile detailed profiles of individuals by scouring the web for their employers, social connections, addresses, and digital footprints, WIRED reports. The prototype system, called InquiryIQ, has never been released to customers or pitched to law enforcement, according to Clearview CEO Amos Kyler. WIRED uncovered the tool by analyzing files that Clearview's login page sends to any visitor's browser, revealing code and interface text that describe how the company designed InquiryIQ to "automatically discover and enrich personal data from web sources."
The system was built to take information an investigator finds through a Clearview face-recognition search and then automatically spread across the internet, opening websites, examining images, and pulling together what it discovers into a profile containing potential aliases, employers, physical descriptions, and known associates of someone under investigation. The interface indicates that providing age, gender, and race can help the system make "smarter decisions" during searches, according to code WIRED examined. One AI model that Clearview tested to drive those decisions came from SpaceXAI, the Elon Musk firm behind Grok, which merged with SpaceX in February. As InquiryIQ searches using details supplied by investigators, it's designed to construct what Clearview calls a "Candidate Graph" of potential identities and connections while populating the subject's profile with possible phone numbers, social media profiles, arrest records, and alternative names. When finished, the interface presents officers with the identities and other details the system surfaced, which they can accept or reject before adding them to the profile. Clearview warns that demographic data, social media information, and arrest details generated automatically "may or may not be accurate," and officers must confirm they independently verified any finding before accepting it.
Clearview tells WIRED that InquiryIQ is a prototype that was never sold or shown to customers and isn't currently planned for release as it exists now. The company disputes that the tool functions as an automated investigator, instead describing InquiryIQ as a limited method to automate the web searches detectives already conduct. 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 select which model conducted the research. The company says modern AI tools have made it much faster to build sophisticated prototypes, and the directive to Clearview's engineers is to move prototypes along rapidly because it's now possible to do so. Clearview was founded in 2017 and initially operated largely out of public view before a 2020 New York Times investigation revealed it had scraped over 3 billion images from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo, and millions of other sites. The company's database has since grown to well over 70 billion images, and Clearview says more than 2,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide use its technology.
Experts say InquiryIQ and similar tools could reshape police investigations by compressing days or weeks of detective work into minutes, according to the report. 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. Because generative AI can produce different answers from the same starting point, experts say it may be difficult to reconstruct why the system pursued one lead instead of another. Boston University privacy scholar Woodrow Hartzog argues that the labor of investigative work once served as a practical check on surveillance, and by vastly reducing the labor required to investigate a person, tools like InquiryIQ also eliminate those checks. George Washington University law professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson describes this kind of automated investigation as "digital rummaging" and sees potential upside: AI-assisted investigations could leave a clearer record of how police arrived at a suspect than traditional detective work does, creating an investigative trail easier to audit. Michael Price, litigation director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers' Fourth Amendment Center, questions whether hallucination-prone chatbots should be trusted as the basis for probable cause. Kyler insists that InquiryIQ's output, like everything Clearview surfaces, would be treated as information for investigators to evaluate, with human analysts responsible for deciding what constitutes a real lead. Ferguson's optimism is tempered by 16 years of watching police technology get deployed before agencies work out how it should be governed. The tension between efficiency and oversight will intensify as investigative automation becomes cheap enough to deploy at scale, forcing departments to choose between speed and the procedural friction that once protected civil liberties.