Federal Bureau of Investigation

The Justice Department's 2025 AI use case inventory (as consolidated by the Office of Management and Budget) lists the FBI's Next Generation Identification (NGI) system as a deployed, high-impact use (entry DOJ-0135), in which AI is used to improve biometric and name-based matching and returns candidates as potential investigative leads; it gives June 2025 as the operational date of this use and shows testing, impact assessment, monitoring and training as still in progress. GAO's 2016 report GAO-16-267 describes the system: the NGI Interstate Photo System, in place since 2011, lets law enforcement search a database of more than 30 million photographs and returns 2 to 50 candidates, and the FBI's Facial Analysis, Comparison and Evaluation (FACE) Services unit searches it and other databases for FBI investigations, returning at most the top one or two photographs to agents as leads. Biometric Update (20 February 2026) reports that the FBI describes NGI's facial recognition search as producing a ranked list of candidate photographs and its policy as treating results as "investigative leads only and not probable cause", and that, according to outside analysis of the inventory, none of the FBI's deployed high-impact uses had completed the required risk-management steps. The Inspector General's December 2024 audit records the FBI's facial recognition policy directives and an ongoing partnership with NIST to test the accuracy of certain facial recognition technologies. The inventory separately lists an in-house facial recognition tool (DOJ-0122) and two vendor-purchased tools, one searching open-source images and one identifying sex trafficking victims (DOJ-0126 and DOJ-0137), all deployed in 2025 without vendors named; they are not part of this record.