Meta Tapped a Pentagon Supplier to Prototype Face Recognition for Its Glasses

Meta is testing face-recognition software built by a company that sells surveillance tools to police departments and the United States military, as it explores bringing the technology to its smart glasses, WIRED has learned.

The arrangement is documented in a software license, obtained by WIRED, that was issued by Rank One Computing—a Denver-based company that derives roughly 80 percent of its revenue from government clients—and is tied to a test version of the Meta AI app that powers Meta’s Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses.

Rank One’s face recognition has been bought by the US Marshals Service, which uses it to confirm prisoners’ identities without fingerprinting them during transport, and by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service—the Navy’s police force—which purchased the company’s video tool, ROC Watch. Rank One developed long-range face recognition for US Special Operations Command under a government research contract, saying its software could identify a face from as far as a kilometer away. Police departments across the country use its algorithms too, embedded in tools they buy from other vendors.

The license is the first known evidence of a business relationship between Meta and Rank One, and it offers a rare look at the kind of technology Meta is weighing as it considers face recognition for a mass-market consumer device. It also shows how thin the line has grown between the surveillance technology sold to law enforcement and the military and the consumer products sold to everyone else.

Increasingly, the same companies, and the same underlying algorithms, serve both.

The license Meta acquired authorizes use of Rank One’s face recognition along with its liveness detection, which checks whether a camera is seeing a real person rather than a photo or mask. It supports up to 10 million facial templates and remains active. Code reviewed by WIRED shows that remnants of Rank One’s integration—the routines that load its license and initialize its software—remained in a version of Meta’s app that shipped this month, dormant, to millions of consumers, alongside the company’s own face-recognition system.

None of the face-recognition systems tied to Meta’s smart glasses were ever active for users. Meta deleted them from the app entirely on June 5, a day after WIRED revealed that the company had quietly built an unreleased face-recognition system, internally called NameTag, into the Meta AI app—the companion software for its smart glasses, downloaded to more than 50 million phones. The system was dormant and could not be accessed by users.

Meta would say almost nothing about the arrangement, declining to answer WIRED’s questions about its relationship with Rank One. Meta would not say why it licensed the software, when the relationship began, or whether it is ongoing.

Rank One declined to comment for this story.

Rank One Computing was founded in 2015 by a group of engineers who had built face-recognition systems at the nonprofit research institute Noblis—work that included evaluating algorithms for a US intelligence research agency. The company went public on the Nasdaq in February.

Rank One’s leadership is drawn from the senior ranks of law enforcement and intelligence. Its chief executive, B. Scott Swann, previously ran the FBI division that operates the bureau’s biometric databases. Its board includes a former CIA deputy director for science and technology, a former head of the FBI’s science and technology branch, and a former Pentagon official who stood up a multibillion-dollar special-capabilities office.