Federal Bureau of Investigation

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board staff report on the FBI's use of open source information (20 November 2025), which describes the open source tools the FBI used at the time of publication, places Clearview AI, with ZeroFox and Babel Street, among tools that need an open assessment or investigation because of a heightened risk to privacy and civil liberties, and refers to safeguards specific to Clearview AI. The FBI did not allow details of how it uses these tools, its safeguards or retention to be published, so the public report does not describe the use; its only illustration, in a counterterrorism context, is a hypothetical example that the report says is not based on real cases. The report is a staff report that has not been voted on by a quorate Board. GAO's September 2023 report found that 196 FBI staff had accessed Clearview AI for criminal investigations between October 2019 and March 2022, only 10 of whom had completed facial recognition training; no training was required, although FBI officials had told the FBI's AI Ethics Council and privacy unit that it was, and GAO recommended that the FBI require training and clarify its status. Federal procurement records published by Biometric Update include an FBI purchase order to Clearview AI of $18,000 signed on 30 December 2021. The Justice Department's 2025 AI use case inventory lists a deployed, vendor-purchased FBI tool for facial recognition of open-source images (DOJ-0126) without naming the vendor. These sources do not give the date the FBI began using Clearview AI or current usage figures.