Launching today
WEIR AI
Track your identity online to protect it or earn from it
174 followers
Track your identity online to protect it or earn from it
174 followers
WEIR AI is a privacy-first platform to help you find and protect yourself online. Set your terms, monitor for mentions (including hidden ones), get public identity checkups, and file claims or license on your terms.
WEIR AI
I never expected to get grilled and testify in billion-dollar lawsuits, but there I was. The topics: privacy, consent, biometric data. I’ll spare you the details, but honestly it’s less about those lawsuits and more about the experiences that led up to them.
What I came to understand is this: around the world, your public identity — how you show up online — can impact your life, your freedom, and your finances in ways you’d never expect. And the wave of AI tools has made the cost of manipulating someone’s identity effectively zero.
My co-founder, Tal, and I saw this wave coming years ago and knew we had to do something about it.
WEIR AI is a privacy and consent-centric identity rights platform. We help people track their identity online, to protect it or earn from it.
Building it meant reinventing identity recognition technology from scratch, purpose-built to put people in control without limiting their commercial options.
Nothing off the shelf could do what we needed, so we built it ourselves. We formed WEIR as a Public Benefit Corporation with a mission rooted in the privacy, safety, and security of people and institutions. For us, that was never a question.
We’ve been grinding for a while and documenting some of it on social media.
The good news? Our instincts turned out to be dead on.
The less-than-good news? It’s taken much more effort, resources, and time than we ever planned for.
But we’re here now, and we’re genuinely excited to show you what we’ve been working on
We’ve learned from our design partners and customers about their needs and how we can help. We have a lot more ahead of us, but we’re proud of what we’ve built and how it’s already impacting people’s lives.
Whether you’re the biggest celebrity in the world or a regular Joe, WEIR AI helps you protect, control, and benefit from what’s uniquely yours — your public identity.
@gary_mccoy Congratulations Gary. The product pitch includes earning from your identity, how does that work in practice? Does WEIR AI facilitate licensing deals or just the discovery and consent layer?
WEIR AI
@kimberly_ross Great question Kimberly. In addition to discovery and consent, there is a simple claims process for recovering value if your likeness is already in use commercially somewhere. We are also working on partnerships with existing marketplaces to help people land licensing deals.
Tal's framing of the core paradox is what makes this compelling: the technology capable of protecting you has become so legally toxic that the companies who built it won't touch it. Which means the bad actors operate freely while individuals have no recourse. That's a real structural problem, not just a product gap.
The subscription model where you're the customer, not the product, is also the only business model that makes this mission credible long term. Gary's list of safeguards is thorough but that single line does more trust-building work than all the features combined.
As someone who professionally orchestrates AI image models, I find the "earn from it" side of the positioning underexplored and genuinely interesting. How does the licensing flow work in practice when a brand or platform wants to use someone's likeness commercially? Is WEIR handling the transaction layer or just the discovery and consent layer? Congrats on the launch!
WEIR AI
@joao_seabra Thanks for the question Joao. The licensing turned out to be very difficult to figure out -- and I'm sure customers and the market has more to teach us. IP agreements including those involving your name, image and likeness are incredibly complex to compose, understand, and enforce. Our goal was to radically simplify and automate the process and we had several false starts.
How it works now is that we've created an initial set predefined license types (presently 8 described at https://weir.ai/license-types) that encapsulate all of the critical terms and combine them with a very short list of settings (e.g. expiration dates, rates, etc). Some of those we designed like the default "Protect" license which limits use of your likeness to non-commercial purposes or the experimental "Sora Cameo" license which lets you get paid to let people add you to their sora videos. Others like the SAG AFTRA New Media type is designed to reflect the term of that orgs existing membership license.
So, in practice users can pick a license, add a few settings and publish -- either privately or to the public. If its to the public, they can share directly themselves or as we establish the marketplace partnerships, those license can flow their via our APIs.
@gary_mccoy This is really thoughtful design. Predefined license types that abstract the legal complexity while still covering edge cases like SAG AFTRA terms is the right approach. The Sora Cameo license in particular is a great example of staying ahead of where the market is going. Looking forward to seeing how the marketplace partnerships develop. 🙌
Hi @gary_mccoy ,
Saw WEIR AI on Product Hunt — the identity ownership concept is compelling, especially in the AI era.
One thought: the headline feels broad, and “identity” can mean many things. Narrowing it around a specific outcome (e.g., AI-era reputation protection or data ownership monetization) could make the value more immediately tangible.
Curious who you see as the primary user right now.
WEIR AI
@harsh_upadhyay10 Hi Harsh -- You can't see it, but I'm smiling. How to clearly communicate what it is WEIR AI does and for who it is in the market and on PH is quite the challenge.
Tal and I have been working in this space for quite a long time and realized that there really wasn't any existing terminology to refer to it, so, after a bunch of surveys, trial and error and testing in the market we landed on the term "public identity" last year as being the most helpful way of describing it.
To the extent that there was a pre-existing term, it was NIL or "Name, Image and Likeness" but what we heard over and over was that either A) people didn't know what it meant or B) they associated with college sports.
But to get to your main question, the primary users today are creators, athletes, and performers. More generally, it's high profile individuals who depend upon their likeness for their business but most of our marketing materials are directed towards them and the teams that support them (i.e. their human agents, business managers, legal representation, publicists, assistants, etc).
For this audience, what has resonated most with them is combining the concepts of protection and monetization. We found that talking about protection alone or monetization alone was far less effective than combining the two. We are trying very hard to communicate in ways that audience understands and finds compelling.
WEIR AI
Hey Product Hunt.
I'm Tal, co-founder and CTO of WEIR AI.
I've spent twenty years building face recognition systems, first in academia, then leading face recognition development at AWS and Meta. I know how this technology works, and I know what it makes possible, for better and for worse.
Here's the problem: your face shows up in places you never agreed to. Social media posts, ad campaigns, AI-generated content. Sometimes you don't even know it's happening. And right now, there is very little you can do about it.
Why? Because the technology that could help, face recognition, has become so legally toxic that no large company will touch it. Billions in fines and a tightening web of biometric privacy laws mean that the companies with the resources and expertise to protect you have every incentive to stay far away. So the tools that could give you control over your own face simply don't exist. Meanwhile, the bad actors using your likeness without permission don't care about any of that.
We built WEIR AI to close that gap. Our technology was designed from scratch to be privacy-preserving at the algorithmic level, not as a legal patch on top of old systems. That's what makes it possible to do what nobody else will: find where your face appears and put you in control of it.
You decide the rules: take something down, require attribution, or get paid when someone uses your face commercially. Your face, your call.
For creators, public figures, and professionals whose appearance is part of their livelihood, this is not a hypothetical problem. It is happening to them right now, every day.
My co-founder Gary McCoy and I started WEIR AI as a public benefit corporation because we believe the people who built the technology that makes face recognition possible (yes, that includes me) have a responsibility to also build the tools that put control back in people's hands.
We call it Public Identity Management. Try it and let us know what you think.
Tal and the WEIR AI team
@tal_hassner The founder journey is a tumultuous one but you are indeed here now and this is great! Congrats on your launch, I think this is a great product that is so needed. Does this work on only personal identity or can you keep an eye on say… your company as well?
WEIR AI
I have always been fascinated by how technology shapes, constrains, and impacts human identity and our sense of self. Long before deepfakes and AI generative models became dinner table conversation, I was writing my PhD on the relationship between technology and personal identity, and how we need to revisit law and policy to make technology an instrument of identity protection and expression. My core conviction, then and now, is that people deserve the right to define and express their own identity on their own terms, and that the design of technology is never neutral in that equation.
That conviction accompanied me, years later, to Meta, where I had the privilege of working alongside some of the sharpest minds I've ever encountered, including Gary McCoy and Tal Hassner. Together, we navigated the complex, often treacherous terrain of deploying facial recognition and identity technologies at scale: the technical challenges were immense, but the legal and policy dimensions were equally daunting. We saw firsthand the challenges in building AI responsibly, and how much was at stake in that endeavor.
Fast forward to today: what was once a frontier concern is now an urgent crisis. The ability to mimic, replicate, and manipulate a person's identity - their face, their voice, their likeness - is no longer the preserve of sophisticated state actors or well-funded labs. It is cheap, fast, and frighteningly accessible. The question of who controls your identity, and on what terms, has never been more consequential.
This is precisely why Weir.AI exists - and precisely why I couldn't say no when the opportunity came to work with Gary and Tal again. Their vision is not just technically sophisticated; it is morally serious. Weir.AI is on a mission to invert the power dynamic entirely, giving individuals the tools to discover, control, and set the terms for how their identity is used across the digital world.
For me, joining Weir.AI represents the convergence of everything I've studied, built, and believed in - with people I deeply respect, at a moment when the work genuinely matters.
WEIR AI
Having my first cup of coffee this morning. Got a good reminder from my dinner in Oakland last night. I describe WEIR and immediately get worried questions about the potential for surveillance and abuse. Fair. I spend so much time inside this that I forget people don't already know what I know, even though we try to communicate this clearly.
So what safeguards have we put in place? Identity verification before we detect your deep mentions, plain English consent, what we find is private by default, you control who sees your data, delete anytime, download anytime, pursuing open standards so you're not locked in, passkeys and OTP only. Subscription model where you're the customer, not the product.
Being a for-profit, mission-based company is part of what enables this. The business model and the mission point in the same direction and that's not an accident.
Still thinking about that conversation (clearly).
Netlify
Hey PH fam 👋
I’m thrilled to bring WEIR AI to the global tech & startup community today. This one is personal for me.
A few months ago, I sat down with Gary, WEIR’s founder, and within minutes I knew this wasn’t just another privacy tool. Gary has lived this problem — testified in billion-dollar lawsuits around privacy and biometric data, watched AI make identity manipulation nearly free, and decided to do something serious about it.
That conversation stuck with me. So here I am. 🙏
Here’s the uncomfortable truth most of us haven’t fully reckoned with:
Your public identity is out there. And you have almost no control over it.
Your name, your face, your likeness — they’re being scraped, copied, and used every single day. AI has made it easier than ever to manipulate who you are online. And the fallout? It can affect your reputation, your freedom, your finances.
We talked a lot about athletes — NBA players, for example — who are increasingly waking up to the fact that their image and likeness is being exploited in ways they never consented to. But this isn’t just a celebrity problem. It’s everyone’s problem.
WEIR AI is the platform that finally puts you in the driver’s seat.
What makes it stand out:
→ 🔍 Monitor mentions of yourself online — including hidden ones
→ 🧾 Get a full public identity checkup
→ 📋 Set YOUR terms for how your identity is used
→ 💰 File claims or license your likeness on your terms
→ 🏛️ Built as a Public Benefit Corporation — their mission is baked into their DNA
Gary and his co-founder Tal built the identity recognition tech from scratch. Nothing off-the-shelf was good enough. That tells you everything about how seriously they take this.
If you care about privacy, consent, or simply owning what’s yours, this is for you.
Check it out and drop your questions, comments or thoughts below ⬇️
Big congrats to Gary, Tal, and the entire WEIR AI team. The world needs what you’re building. 🚀