Clearview AI, the facial recognition firm that scraped more than 3 billion photos from the internet starting around 2020, has quietly built and tested an experimental AI tool designed to help law enforcement automatically assemble detailed profiles of people under investigation. WIRED reported the development in September 2026 after discovering the tool in publicly accessible files sent by Clearview’s login page to any visitor’s browser.
The tool, called InquiryIQ, is designed to take details surfaced by a Clearview facial recognition search and then automatically scan the web — opening webpages, analyzing images, and compiling a profile that may include a person’s possible employers, aliases, associates, and physical characteristics. Its interface states that supplying a subject’s age, gender, and race can help the system make “smarter decisions” during a search. One of the AI models Clearview tested to power the tool comes from SpaceXAI, the Elon Musk company behind the Grok chatbot. SpaceX and xAI merged in February 2026.
Clearview CEO Amos Kyler told WIRED that InquiryIQ has never been pitched or shipped to customers and is not currently planned for release in its present form. He said the SpaceXAI and other model options visible in the interface were included so engineers could compare model performance during testing — not so law enforcement users could select a model themselves. “No law enforcement user has ever used it, period,” Kyler said.
Experts say tools like InquiryIQ could compress days or weeks of detective work into minutes. While that speed could help police solve crimes faster, it may also lower the practical cost of investigating people who would not otherwise have been scrutinized. Experts also note that because generative AI can produce different outputs from the same starting point, it may be difficult to reconstruct why the system pursued one lead over another.
Clearview described InquiryIQ as a limited way to automate web searches detectives already perform manually, and said the tool’s apparent completeness should not be taken as a sign it is nearing release.
Source: WIRED