Clearview AI Builds AI Profiling Tool That Lets Police Auto-Scrape a Person's Entire Online Life

Clearview AI, whose 70-billion-image face-recognition database already serves over 2,000 law enforcement agencies, has quietly built and tested an AI tool called InquiryIQ that automatically fans out across the web to build a profile of whoever a cop is investigating. Starting from a name or face, the system runs web and image searches, browses pages, applies face recognition to photos it encounters, and assembles a "Candidate Graph" of possible employers, aliases, associates, addresses, phone numbers, and arrest history. The interface also accepts age, gender, and race as inputs, which it says helps the AI make "smarter decisions." One of the models tested to power those decisions was Grok, from xAI.

WIRED found InquiryIQ in code that Clearview's login page sends to any visitor's browser before they sign in. Clearview says the tool is a prototype that has never been shipped to customers and is not planned for release in its current form. The company also says the model selector — which lists xAI and Amazon Bedrock — was for internal comparison testing, not for police use. That explanation may carry less weight given xAI's recent track record: in 2025, an unauthorized change to Grok's system prompt caused it to inject claims about a "white genocide" in South Africa into unrelated conversations, and a subsequent change produced antisemitic posts and praise for Adolf Hitler. As Michael Price of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers' Fourth Amendment Center put it: "A hallucination-prone chatbot would not be trusted as an informant under any other regular circumstances."