Clearview AI, Inc. is an American facial recognition company, providing software primarily to law enforcement and other government agencies. The company's algorithm matches faces to a database of more than 20 billion images collected from the Internet, including social media applications. Founded by Hoan Ton-That, Charles C. Johnson,Luke O'Brien. (May-June 2025) "Clear and present danger". Mother Jones magazine website Vol. 50, no. 3. P.21. Retrieved 14 April 2025. and Richard Schwartz, the company maintained a low profile until late 2019, when its usage by law enforcement was first reported.
Use of the facial recognition tool has been controversial. Several U.S. senators have expressed concern about privacy rights and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has sued the company for violating privacy laws on several occasions. U.S. police have used the software to apprehend suspected criminals. Clearview's practices have led to fines and bans by EU nations for violating privacy laws, and investigations in the U.S. and other countries. In 2022, Clearview reached a settlement with the ACLU, in which they agreed to restrict U.S. market sales of facial recognition services to government entities.
In 2020, a data breach of Clearview AI demonstrated 2,200 organizations in 27 countries had accounts with facial recognition searches. In 2025, they signed a $9.2 million contract with United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In February 2026, Clearview AI signed a one-year $225k contract with United States Customs and Border Protection.
History Clearview AI was founded in 2017 by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz after transferring the assets of another company, SmartCheckr, which the pair originally founded in 2017 alongside Charles C. Johnson.https://www.linkedin.com/company/clearviewai/about/ The company was founded in Manhattan after the founders met at the Manhattan Institute. The company initially raised $8.4 million from investors including Kirenaga Partners and Peter Thiel. Additional fundraising, in 2020, collected $8.625 million in exchange for equity. The company did not disclose investors in the second round. In 2021, another fundraising round received $30 million. Early use of Clearview's app was given to potential investors in their Series A fundraising round. Billionaire John Catsimatidis used it to identify someone his daughter dated and piloted it at one of his Gristedes grocery markets in New York City to identify shoplifters.
In October 2020, a company spokesperson claimed that Clearview AI's valuation was more than $100 million. The company announced its first chief strategy officer, chief revenue officer, and chief marketing officer in May 2021. Devesh Ashra, a former deputy assistant secretary with the United States Department of the Treasury, became its chief strategy officer. Chris Metaxas, a former executive at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, became its chief revenue officer. Susan Crandall, a former marketing executive at LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Motorola Solutions, became its chief marketing officer. Devesh Ashra and Chris Metaxas left the company in 2022.
In August 2021, Clearview AI announced the formation of an advisory board including Raymond Kelly, Richard A. Clarke, Rudy Washington, Floyd Abrams, Lee S. Wolosky, and Owen West. The company claimed to have scraped more than 10 billion images as of October 2021. In May 2022, Clearview AI announced that it would be expanding sales of its facial recognition software to schools and lending platforms outside the U.S.
Clearview AI hired a notable legal team to defend the company against several lawsuits that threatened their business model. Their legal staff includes Tor Ekeland, Lee S. Wolosky, Paul Clement, Floyd Abrams, and Jack Mulcaire. Abrams stated the issue of privacy rights versus free speech in the First Amendment could reach the Supreme Court.
On February 19, 2025, following the resignation of Ton-That in December 2024, Clearview AI appointed Hal Lambert and Richard Schwartz as CEOs. Lambert and Schwartz were early investors in the company. Lambert previously did fundraising for the Trump presidential campaigns. In a separate statement Ton-That said he would remain a board member.
Usage Clearview AI provides facial recognition software where users can upload an image of a face and match it against their database. The software then supplies links to where the "match" can be found online. The company operated in near secrecy until the release of an investigative report in The New York Times titled "The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It" in January 2020. It maintained this secrecy by publishing fake information about the company's location and employees and erasing social media for the founders. Citing the article, over 40 tech and civil rights organizations sent a letter to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) and four congressional committees, outlining their concerns with facial recognition and Clearview, and asking the PCLOB to suspend use of facial recognition.
Clearview served to accelerate a global debate on the regulation of facial recognition technology by governments and law enforcement. Law enforcement officers have stated that Clearview's facial recognition is far superior in identifying perpetrators from any angle than previously used technology. After discovering Clearview AI was scraping images from their site, Twitter sent a cease-and-desist letter to Clearview, insisting that they remove all images as scraping is against Twitter's policies. On February 5 and 6, 2020, Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Venmo sent cease and desist letters as it is against their policies. Ton-That responded in an interview that there is a First Amendment right to access public data. He later stated that Clearview has scraped over 50 billion images from across the web.
The New Zealand Police used it in a trial after being approached by Clearview's Marko Jukic in January 2020. Jukic said it would have helped identify the Christchurch mosque shooter had the technology been available. The usage of Clearview's software in this case raised strong objections once exposed, as neither the users' supervisors or the Privacy Commissioner were aware or approved of its use. After it was revealed by RNZ, Justice Minister Andrew Little stated, "It clearly wasn't endorsed, from the senior police hierarchy, and it clearly didn't get the endorsement from the [Police] Minister... that is a matter of concern."
Clearview's technology was used for identifying an individual at a May 30, 2020 George Floyd police violence protest in Miami, Florida. Miami's WTVJ confirmed this, as the arrest report only said she was "identified through investigative means". The defendant's attorney did not even know it was with Clearview. Ton-That confirmed its use, noting that it was not being used for surveillance, but only to investigate a crime.
In December 2020, the ACLU of Washington sent a letter to Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan, asking her to ban the Seattle Police Department from using Clearview AI. The letter cited public records retrieved by a local blogger, which showed one officer signing up for and repeatedly logging into the service, as well as corresponding with a company representative. While the ACLU letter raised concerns that the officer's usage violated the Seattle Surveillance Ordinance, an auditor at the City of Seattle Office of the Inspector General argued that the ordinance was designed to address the usage of surveillance technologies by the Department itself, not by an officer without the Department's knowledge.
After the January 6 riot at the United States Capitol, the Oxford Police Department in Alabama used Clearview's software to run a number of images posted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in its public request for suspect information to generate leads for people present during the riot. Photo matches and information were sent to the FBI who declined to comment on its techniques.
In March 2022, Ukraine's Ministry of Defence began using Clearview AI's facial recognition technology "to uncover Russian assailants, combat misinformation and identify the dead". Ton-That also claimed that Ukraine's MoD has "more than 2 billion images from the Russian social media service VKontakte at its disposal". Ukrainian government agencies used Clearview over 5,000 times as of April 2022. The company provided these accounts and searches for free.
In a Florida case, Clearview's technology was used by defense attorneys to successfully locate a witness, resulting in the dismissal of vehicular homicide charges against the defendant.
Law enforcement use of the facial recognition software grew rapidly in the United States. In 2022 more than one million searches were conducted. In 2023, this usage doubled.
Following the killing of Alex Pretti in January 2026, the United States Department of Homeland Security launched Operation Puppet Master and Project Whipple Shield, two surveillance operations targeting progressive organizations, labor unions, and other groups opposed to the Trump administration's immigration policy. Undercover agents infiltrated community meetings held in churches, schools and parks, tracked license plate numbers to compile names of people who attended gatherings, and used Clearview AI to compile photo dossiers of activists.
In March 2026, national news outlets reported that the Fargo, North Dakota police department had falsely arrested, and had extradited from her home state, a Tennessee woman on charges of using a fake military ID to commit bank fraud. The evidence used for the false arrest was a facial recognition match from Clearview AI software. This was despite the fact that the woman had never visited North Dakota before and exculpatory evidence existed showing the woman was shopping in Tennessee at the time the fraud was committed.
Marketing efforts and pushback Clearview AI encouraged user adoption by offering free trials to law enforcement officers rather than departments as a whole. The company additionally used its significant connections to the Republican Party to connect with police departments. In onboarding emails, new users were encouraged to go beyond running one or two searches to "see if you can reach 100 searches". During 2020, Clearview sold their facial recognition software for one tenth the cost of competitors.
Clearview's marketing claimed their facial recognition led to a terrorist arrest. The identification was submitted to the New York Police Department tip line. Clearview claims to have solved two other New York cases and 40 cold cases, later stating they submitted them to tip lines. NYPD stated they have no institutional relationship with Clearview, but their policies do not ban its use by individual officers. In 2020, thirty NYPD officers were confirmed to have Clearview accounts. In April 2021, documents obtained by the Legal Aid Society under New York's Freedom Of Information Law demonstrated that Clearview had collaborated with the NYPD for years, contrary to past NYPD denials. Clearview met with senior NYPD leadership and entered into a vendor contract with the NYPD. Clearview came under renewed scrutiny for enabling officers to conduct large numbers of searches without formal oversight or approval.
The company was sent a cease and desist letter from the office of New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal after including a promotional video on its website with images of Grewal. Clearview had claimed that its app played a role in a New Jersey police sting. Grewal confirmed the software was used to identify a child predator, but he also banned the use of Clearview in New Jersey. Tor Ekeland, a lawyer for Clearview, confirmed the marketing video was taken down the same day.