Clearview AI tested InquiryIQ, an AI tool to profile people for police

Clearview AI has built and tested an unreleased AI tool called InquiryIQ that is designed to take details an investigator pulls from a Clearview face-recognition search and automatically fan out across the web, opening webpages, analyzing images, and assembling a profile of the person under investigation, WIRED reported on September 10. The prototype, which had not been previously reported, would surface possible employers, aliases, associates, social accounts, and physical characteristics of a person police are looking into.

The tool extends the approach that made Clearview infamous. In 2020 the firm drew widespread condemnation for scraping more than 3 billion photos from the internet to turn faces into names for police and security professionals. InquiryIQ picks up where that name match ends, attempting to fill in who the person is, who they know, where they live, and what they have left behind online.

According to code for the tool analyzed by WIRED, InquiryIQ's interface states that supplying age, gender, and race can help the system make "smarter decisions" as it searches. One of the models Clearview 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 the demographic inputs or how they might shape its output, and Clearview declined to speculate.

Clearview disputes that InquiryIQ amounts to an automated investigator. The company describes it as a limited way to automate the web searches detectives already perform, and says the prototype has never been pitched or shipped to customers and is not currently planned for release in its present form. CEO Amos Kyler said in an interview that 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.

Experts told WIRED that InquiryIQ and tools like it could reshape police investigations by compressing days or weeks of detective work into minutes. The 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, the experts said, it may be difficult to reconstruct why the system pursued one lead instead of another.

The reporting leaves several questions open. WIRED did not establish how SpaceXAI would handle the age, gender, and race inputs the interface invites, and Clearview declined to speculate on that point. The company's account of the model options as an internal comparison exercise, rather than a customer-facing choice, is its own characterization and is not independently corroborated in the available text. The full WIRED article, including any additional detail on the tool's testing or the company's response, was not accessible beyond the opening section.

What happens next depends on whether Clearview moves InquiryIQ toward release. The company says it has no current plans to ship the prototype in its present form, and it has not pitched the tool to customers. No timeline for further testing or any decision on the product was disclosed.