Clearview AI Is Testing an AI Tool That Would Let Cops Unearth Your Life Online
| Source: Wired AI
Tags: Clearview AI, surveillance, law enforcement, facial recognition, xAI, Grok, privacy, InquiryIQ
Wired discovered Clearview AI has quietly built InquiryIQ, a prototype AI analyst tool that takes a facial recognition match and auto-generates an online profile — employers, aliases, associates — using xAI's Grok. The tool accepts age, gender, and race inputs to shape searches and was found embedded in Clearview's own login page JavaScript.
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Clearview AI, the facial recognition company that scraped 3 billion+ photos to serve law enforcement, has built a prototype tool called InquiryIQ that pairs facial recognition with generative AI to automatically construct investigative profiles. After a Clearview search identifies a person, InquiryIQ fans out across the web — opening pages, analyzing images, and assembling data on employers, aliases, associates, and physical characteristics. WIRED uncovered InquiryIQ in JavaScript files loaded by Clearview's public login page, the same technique used to expose OS Investigate last month. The interface accepts demographic inputs — age, gender, and race — that the system uses to make 'smarter decisions' during searches. One model tested to power it was xAI's Grok (SpaceX and xAI merged in February 2026). Clearview CEO Amos Kyler told WIRED the tool is a prototype, has never been accessed by law enforcement, and is not currently planned for release. Experts quoted by WIRED identify two key risks: first, speed — compressing days of detective work into minutes lowers the threshold for investigative fishing expeditions. Second, auditability — generative AI can produce different outputs from the same starting point, making it difficult to reconstruct why the system pursued one lead over another, which creates legal defensibility problems for any resulting prosecution. Clearview frames InquiryIQ as merely automating web searches that detectives already perform manually. That framing will be tested if the tool or successors reach production, since the legal and ethical standards for AI-assisted surveillance profiling are still largely unsettled.