Green Berets are now using Clearview AI's facial recognition
A newly public contract summary shows that the U.S. Army's Fort Bragg and 1st Special Forces Command began licensing facial recognition from Clearview AI in March.
Updated at 2:53 pm ET with information from the January 28 sources sought notice.
According to a newly public U.S. Government procurement summary, the controversial Manhattan-based facial recognition company Clearview AI in March signed its first direct licensing agreement with the parent organization of U.S. Army Special Forces, which have been publicly known as the Green Berets since President Kennedy elevated the organization as a central component of his administration’s focus on counterinsurgency.
The $75,000 contract provides 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne) — which further houses the 4th and 8th Psychological Operations Groups — with access to Clearview AI’s “intelligence service” for twelve months. Perhaps the most high-profile usage of Clearview AI has been by the Ukrainian military in response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of the country, with The Washington Post reporting that the facial recognition was used to harass the mothers of dead Russian soldiers with pictures of their deceased children as part of ‘classical psychological warfare.’ The Europe-focused 10th Special Forces Group, which was created in 1952 as the first Green Beret unit, has played a major role in training Ukrainian special operations forces since 2014.
The sources sought notice for the contract was published on January 28, specifying the ‘salient characteristics’ required for the five Clearview AI facial recognition licenses, including accuracy of “98%” over “50 billion images.”
The $75,000 contract with 1st Special Forces Command follows $67,200 in obligations with the Army’s Criminal Investigations Unit’s 502nd Military Police Battalion between September 2020 and May 2023, as well as a $150,000 subaward in December 2024 as part of the British weapons manufacturer BAE Systems’ $482 million contract with the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) for open source intelligence capabilities. Public records also show $46,500 in obligations from U.S. Special Operations Command for Clearview AI’s surveillance product through the Tampa-based contractor NexTech Solutions.
In April 2024, this publication exclusively reported on leaked documents from the nonprofit Alethia Labs showing that U.S. Army Special Operations Command personnel were trained in a NexTech Solutions facility in Tampa to use the Face++ facial recognition software developed by the entity-listed Chinese firm Megvii.
But support for Clearview AI’s aggressive indexing of tens of billions of photographs posted across the internet is not universal in the U.S. special operations community. An August 2024 episode of the “Change Agents” podcast hosted by SEAL Team Six veteran Andy Stumpf was headlined “Clearview AI: The Creepy Facial Recognition Start-up that Scraped the Internet” and featured New York Times journalist and “Your Face Belongs to Us” book author Kashmir Hill. Clearview AI’s household reputation as a controversial surveillance company is largely a result of Ms. Hill’s January 2020 Times article, “The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It.”
Clearview AI’s previous long-term CEO, the Australian-born programmer Hoan Ton-That, resigned from the company in December 2024 to make way for the company’s pursuit of contracts with the second Trump administration through the Republican operatives, and new co-CEOs, Richard Schwartz and Hal Lambert.
U.S. Army Special Operations Command and Clearview AI did not respond to requests for comment.