Product1 publisher3 min readPublished
Clearview's unreleased dossier tool asks investigators for age, gender and race
Clearview says InquiryIQ is a prototype no police user has ever touched, but WIRED found its interface text sitting in files the login page hands to any visitor, and that text is now the thing procurement has to ask about.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Clearview AI built and tested an unreleased AI 'analyst assistant' called InquiryIQ that fans out across the web from a search result and assembles possible employers, aliases, associates and physical characteristics.
- One of the models Clearview tested to drive those decisions comes from SpaceXAI, the Musk company behind Grok, which merged with SpaceX in February.
- WIRED found the tool in files Clearview's login page sends to any visitor's browser before sign-in, the same method that surfaced Flock Safety's OS Investigate a month earlier.
Compiled by The Product DeskSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- decision Any agency renewing a face-search contract now has a specific question with a specific field name behind it, and it has to be asked before a pitch exists rather than after one lands.
- constraint If a lead's provenance cannot be replayed, the agency that quoted it in an affidavit is the party that has to explain the path, and the vendor's testing notes will not do that work.
- exposure The people made newly reachable are the ones nobody would have opened a file on, because the cheaper the sweep gets the weaker the predicate needed to start one.
- contradiction Clearview rejects the automated-investigator framing while its own interface copy describes automatically discovering and enriching personal data, so a buyer choosing which description to trust is choosing between the sales conversation and the shipped strings.
A detective who has just turned a face into a name does the next part by hand: search the name, open the property record, the old profile photos, the employer page, and write down what looks relevant. Clearview's own account of InquiryIQ is that it automates that work and nothing more [8]. Take the company at its word, and the change that matters is the record it leaves, not the speed. Hand-done searching leaves a trail a supervisor can walk back: which pages, in which order, and a person who can say why they clicked. The experts WIRED spoke to say the automated version may not be reconstructable, because a generative model handed the same starting point can go somewhere else the second time [7].
The demographic line is the one that will stop a procurement reviewer. According to code WIRED analyzed, the interface tells investigators that supplying age, gender and race helps the system make "smarter decisions" as it searches [3]. What the system does with those values is not described; WIRED reports it is unclear how they would shape output, and Clearview declined to speculate [5]. One model tested to power those decisions came from SpaceXAI, the Musk company behind Grok [4]. CEO Amos Kyler says the model options in the interface were there so engineers could compare performance during testing rather than so an officer could choose, and that no law enforcement user has ever used the tool [9].
The artifact everyone is now arguing about is client-side text. WIRED found InquiryIQ in files Clearview's login page sends to any visitor's browser before sign-in, the same method that surfaced Flock Safety's OS Investigate a month earlier [10]. That is two vendors of police software whose unreleased AI investigation tools were read out of their own pre-login bundles in consecutive months [15]. The files carry code and thousands of lines of interface copy, including the description of a tool built to "automatically discover and enrich personal data from web sources" [12]. They do not show what happens on Clearview's servers, how well the thing works, or who has used it [11].
That gap matters for anyone writing a security questionnaire. There is no contract, no price, no deployment and no efficacy figure in this evidence. What exists is a vendor that spent its early years signing up police departments on free trials after Peter Thiel put in $200,000 in 2017 [14], and that says its engineers are now directed to push prototypes along quickly because modern tooling makes that possible [13]. Clearview says plainly that interface completeness does not amount to a shipping date [13]. It is also the only part of the product an outside reviewer can currently read.
The grid worth drawing before the demo: on one axis, whether an output from a tool like this can land in a case file or an affidavit; on the other, whether the query can be reproduced a year later with its inputs, model version and visited pages logged. Reproducible and never quoted is internal tooling, while quotable and unreproducible is the quadrant where the agency, not the vendor, answers for how the lead was chosen [7]. The demographic field determines which quadrant a buyer is standing in, which is why the field list belongs in the contract language rather than the release notes [3].
What to watch
- Whether InquiryIQ, or anything derived from it, turns up in an agency demo or contract, and which input fields survive.
- Whether Clearview names the model actually running any released version, given SpaceXAI was among those tested.
- Whether police software vendors start stripping unreleased feature text out of pre-login browser bundles after Flock and Clearview were read this way.