According to Wired, American surveillance technology company Clearview AI once developed and tested a prototype tool named InquiryIQ, which combined its facial recognition system with the model of xAI under Elon Musk. This feature was not publicly released; instead, it was discovered by journalists in code files sent from the Clearview login page to browsers.
The goal of this set of tools is not merely to return names after face matching. According to reports, the system will continue to scrape public online information, supplement personal backgrounds, and organize possible clues such as associated individuals, addresses, phone numbers, employers, and aliases. Compared to simply identifying identities, this indicates that the tools are beginning to extend towards automated profiling and relationship sorting.
The tool can continue to track public online information.
Reports indicate that InquiryIQ is capable of performing web searches, image searches, and page browsing. It also re-performs facial recognition on the photos encountered during the retrieval process. Based on this, the system generates a "candidate relationship diagram" to connect different pieces of identity evidence for investigators to further verify.
The code content also shows that the interface prompts investigators to add information such as age, gender, and race to help the system make “smarter” judgments during searches. The CEO stated to the media that options provided by xAI and other model providers are only used for internal testing of different model performances and are not intended for law enforcement personnel to choose from when handling cases.
The company stated that InquiryIQ is still in the prototype stage and has never been provided to any customers, nor is there any plan to launch it in its current form.
The database scale has increased to 60 to 70 billion records.
Clearview indicates that the company's database currently contains approximately 60 to 70 billion facial image records, which are sourced from public internet content. The company also claims that tests conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the United States NIST have shown that its core algorithm has an identification accuracy rate of over 99% across different demographic groups.
On this basis, the addition of the generative AI further extends the system's capabilities. It no longer merely focuses on "identifying who" but attempts to provide more background information around the identification results. This is also one of the main reasons why the outside world pays attention to this tool.
According to the settlement agreement reached in 2022 between Clearview and the American Civil Liberties Union ( ACLU ), the company currently only provides services to audited U.S. government agencies and law enforcement departments. This restriction also constitutes a major constraint on its customer base.
The US Customs awarded a contract to them this year.
The report mentioned that in February of this year, the United States Customs and Border Protection Agency signed a one-year contract worth $225,000 with Clearview, which included uses such as tactical target identification and counter-network analysis. This indicates that despite ongoing disputes surrounding data harvesting and privacy issues, federal agencies are still purchasing their core identification technologies.
However, there is no public announcement regarding the integration of InquiryIQ with the xAI model, nor are there any regulatory filing documents available. Reports suggest that this makes it difficult for outsiders to determine whether the tool is still in the internal testing phase or has already been piloted on a small scale.
Privacy researchers are concerned that in the past, investigators had to manually search for public online information, a process that itself posed certain limitations; if this task is automated by AI, existing oversight mechanisms may struggle to keep up in a timely manner. Clearview indicates that this tool is only used to generate leads, and ultimately, investigators still need to verify them independently.
