Immigration and Customs Enforcement contracted Clearview AI for $9.2 million to expand facial recognition surveillance capabilities, ostensibly for child exploitation investigations and officer ‘assault’ cases. ICE has already spent $3.7 million of the contract. Clearview AI’s …
Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) agents, whose mandate is protecting diplomats and securing U.S. embassies abroad, began patrolling Washington DC streets alongside FBI, Customs and Border Patrol, and U.S. Marshals Service, making arrests for minor offenses unrelated to diplomatic security. The DSS …
Over 2,300 National Guard troops from West Virginia, South Carolina, Mississippi, Ohio, Louisiana, and Tennessee began patrolling Washington DC streets carrying M17 handguns and M4 semiautomatic rifles, marking an unprecedented militarization of the nation’s capital during peacetime. The armed …
Hoan Ton-That, co-founder and CEO of controversial facial recognition startup Clearview AI, resigned from his position, stating “it is time for the next chapter in my life.” Ton-That said he would remain on as a board member but declined to comment on what specifically sparked his …
By mid-2024, U.S. defense contractors and surveillance technology companies began systematically marketing their systems as “battle-tested in Ukraine,” transforming the ongoing war into a real-world demonstration and validation platform for AI-powered surveillance, autonomous weapons, …
On April 26, 2023, the Ukrainian government launched Brave1, a state-backed coordination platform designed to accelerate development of dual-use military and surveillance technologies. Founded by a coalition including the Ministry of Digital Transformation, Ministry of Defence, General Staff of the …
On April 22, 2023, Palantir Technologies announced a partnership with Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office to process massive volumes of war crimes evidence using artificial intelligence and data analytics. At the time of the announcement, Ukraine had registered more than 78,000 alleged …
On June 1, 2022, Palantir CEO Alex Karp crossed the border from Poland into Ukraine and met President Volodymyr Zelensky in the presidential palace bunker, becoming the first major Western tech CEO to visit since Russia’s February invasion. Karp told Zelensky they could work together “in …
Ukraine’s defense ministry began using Clearview AI’s facial recognition technology in early March 2022, just weeks after Russia’s invasion, after CEO Hoan Ton-That offered free access to the company’s database of over 10 billion photos. Ton-That first demonstrated the tool …
Clearview AI closed a $30 million Series B funding round led by Kirenaga Partners, valuing the controversial facial recognition company at $130 million. The investment came despite ongoing privacy investigations in multiple countries and widespread regulatory findings that the company’s …
New York Times journalist Kashmir Hill published a groundbreaking exposé titled “The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy As We Know It,” revealing that Clearview AI had scraped 3 billion faces from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo, and millions of other websites without anyone’s …
The New York Police Department signed a nondisclosure agreement with Clearview AI on December 6, 2018, beginning a secret trial period that would run through March 6, 2019. The trial marked one of the first major law enforcement deployments of Clearview’s controversial facial recognition …
Clearview AI was founded in 2017 by Australian tech entrepreneur Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz, a former aide to Rudy Giuliani when he was mayor of New York. The company was created after transferring the assets of another company, SmartCheckr, which the pair originally founded alongside …