1 week Ago By Brandon Vigliarolo
Clearview AI has booted founder and former CEO Hoan Ton-That from its board, just weeks after he stepped down as president. Hoan Ton-That confirmed his removal, which Forbes reported was the result of a Tuesday shareholder vote, to The Register on Wednesday. "I was unexpectedly removed from the Clearview AI board," Ton-That told us.
Clearview declined to comment. The upstart's co-CEO Hal Lambert, who now leads the firm alongside longtime exec Richard Schwartz, told Forbes shareholders voted to oust Ton-That as part of a shift in direction. After stepping down as CEO last December, apparently amid a struggle to bag major government contracts, Ton-That transitioned into the role of president, only to resign from that post in February.
He resurfaced shortly after as CTO of Architect Capital, an investor known for backing high-risk ventures. With his board seat now gone, Ton-That has no official ties left to the surveillance outfit he co-founded in 2017. Ton-That's severance from Clearview comes after years of public-relations disasters for the biz, which has been under scrutiny since its existence became public knowledge in 2020.
Clearview built a massive AI-powered facial-recognition database by scraping billions of publicly available images from across the internet, often without explicit consent. It was, and still is used, by law enforcement in some parts of the US, at least. It aimed to offer a service that worked like this: Let's say you're a cop with a copy of a suspect's face from some security camera footage.
You can run that face through Clearview's database of photos, and if there's a match, the biz will tell you which social media page it got the matching photo from, along with details scraped from it, so now you have a name and contact info for the person in that camera footage, allowing you to investigate them specifically. It was sued multiple times for alleged privacy violations. In one case settled last year, New York-based Clearview agreed to a deal in which plaintiffs would only be recompensed if the biz floated on the stock market or was sold, with the filings suggesting that compensating "virtually everyone in the United States whose face appears on the internet" would be financially unworkable for the still-unprofitable biz.
It was also fined €30.5 million by the Dutch Data Protection Authority last year. However, a similar £7.
5 million penalty from the UK's Information Commissioner's Office was thrown out in late 2023, after a tribunal ruled the British regulator lacked jurisdiction over Clearview's activities. According to email exchanges and other information obtained by Mother Jones , Ton-That at one point wanted to pitch Clearview's AI tools to US border security, believing his technology could help deny entry to migrants expressing anti-Trump sentiments online or showing "affinity for far-Left groups." Lest you think Ton-That's ouster would serve to make Peter-Thiel-backed Clearview less of a target for privacy advocates and those worried about the misuse of artificial intelligence to target political opponents, or anyone with a particular political opinion, that doesn't appear to be the case.
Lambert, who is described on his firm Point Bridge Capital's website as an active Republican "for over a decade," was responsible for the establishment of the MAGA ETF , an exchange-traded fund that selects investments based on their alignment with conservative political values. Lambert had expressed a desire to "take down these lefties" in emails obtained by Mother Jones, and has expressed optimism that Clearview would find a home in the Trump administration's incarnations of various federal agencies. "Under the Trump administration, we would hope to grow more than we were able to under the Biden administration," Lambert told Forbes earlier this year.
Lambert will now be able to do so without Clearview's founder to weigh in on the company's future. ® Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke has told all employees that "using AI effectively" is now a baseline expectation in their day-to-day roles. This was said in an internal memo leaked to the press and later shared in full by Lütke on X.
Lütke added AI usage questions would begin appearing in performance and peer reviews. Teams requesting additional headcount, he added, will first have to show why the work can't be done with AI instead. "Before asking for more headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI," Lütke wrote.
"We're all in on this." Shopify staff likely saw this coming. After posting its first full-year profit in 2022, the biz laid off 20 percent of its staff in mid-2023.
In that memo, Lütke cited AI as part of the reason. "We are at the dawn of the AI era and the new capabilities that are unlocked by that are unprecedented," Lutke said in 2023. And also.
.. USCIS, the US government's immigration application processing nerve-center, today said it will start scanning foreigners' social media for signs of antisemitism, which may well lead to requests for visas and green cards being denied.
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