Clearview tests InquiryIQ, an AI profiler built on SpaceXAI's Grok

Clearview spent its first years operating largely out of public view, then became one of the country's most controversial surveillance firms after a 2020 New York Times report revealed it had scraped more than 3 billion images from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other sites. Lawsuits and regulatory investigations followed, but the company kept scraping, and it now says its database holds well over 70 billion images used by more than 2,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide. Founder Hoan Ton-That stepped down as CEO in December 2024 and left the board the following spring; Kyler, who joined as an engineer in 2019 and became CEO in October last year, now talks about controls, auditing and oversight rather than boundary-pushing.

InquiryIQ fits that repositioning awkwardly. For years Clearview said its job stopped at surfacing possible leads, with Ton-That writing in 2022 that it was up to the investigator to follow those links and do more research. InquiryIQ appears designed to take on some of that work, building what Clearview calls a "Candidate Graph" of possible identities and associates while filling out a subject's profile. Experts quoted in the piece say tools like it could compress days or weeks of detective work into minutes, but also lower the cost of fishing expeditions and make it hard to reconstruct why the system pursued one lead over another. Clearview disputes that InquiryIQ amounts to an automated investigator, describing it as a limited way to automate searches detectives already perform.

The stakes likely hinge on two things: whether the prototype ever ships in a form police can use, and how much weight officers end up giving its output. Kyler frames human review as central, saying an analyst's job is to evaluate what is true and what is noise. But Hartzog calls a human in the loop "a little bit of a cold comfort," warning that investigators can defer to automated systems until the person checking the machine becomes a rubber stamp. Ferguson, meanwhile, sees a possible silver lining: a system that preserved its prompts and search paths could leave a clearer audit trail than traditional detective work. Whether that upside materializes, he suggests, depends on whether agencies work out how such tools should be governed before deploying them.