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Is there a software feature if its code is deployed on millions of people’s devices but they can’t use it yet? Not if you work in dead.
Company executives have spent the past few weeks making this semantic argument for NameTag, the software in development. Face recognition The system that Meta was built for Her smart glasses. The inevitable result is confusion, but it’s easy to explain.
On June 4, WIRED reported Meta includes powerful — but inactive — code for the NameTag in Meta AI, the companion app for Meta Ray-Ban sunglasses that has been downloaded tens of millions of times. In response to our story, Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, responded in part by writing On X“Here’s the thing: Wire Reports Meta hasn’t answered several questions about how this works. How could we? The feature doesn’t exist!” dead Remove NameTag icon From Meta AI the next day.
According to a WIRED analysis of the Meta AI app, the NameTag token appeared in the app as early as January. In mid-February, New York Times It was mentioned that Meta was working on NameTag facial recognition. By May, WIRED found that core components of the NameTag code were present in the MetaAI app.
Whether a feature existed before the metacode was removed depends on how “feature” and “existence” are defined. Whatever his position, he is a researcher named Bushodi I reviewed the code upon WIRED’s requestIt was able to use the NameTag system to identify an image of the face of philosopher Michel Foucault, famous for his writings on surveillance as an instrument of power.
The claim that Meta has no way to describe how the feature works — or even will work — was further undermined last week, when Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth detailed it in a podcast.
On the July 8 episode of the program The most interesting thing about artificial intelligence, Host Nicholas Thompson — CEO of The Atlantic and former editor-in-chief of WIRED — asked who would define NameTag during a segment of the discussion titled “What’s Right and Wrong About NameTag.” “I’ve personally met someone wearing your glasses and they introduce themselves — or you say, ‘Okay, this is David, remember this person.'” Bosworth responded. “Only available to you when you have your glasses on — this is the person you’ve met before. Here’s their name. They’re right in front of you… This is what we call the NameTags feature.”
“So, it’s something that, I think would be a great feature,” Bosworth later said of NameTag.
In response to WIRED’s inquiries about this apparent contradiction, Meta repeatedly stressed the conditional nature of Bosworth’s statement — that it “will” be a great advantage, not that it is or will be. Spokesman Ryan Daniels specifically highlighted and emphasized the word “will” in bold, in an email exchange with WIRED about the apparent disconnect between Stone’s claim that NameTag doesn’t exist and Bosworth’s minutes-long description of it.
“There’s no contradiction. Bose says this would be a good feature, especially for answering calls from blind and visually impaired community members to help them recognize people they’ve already met or want to remember,” Daniels told WIRED in a statement. “While we’re exploring this, it’s not available to consumers today. We think it’s important for people to understand that this remains different than connecting glasses to a central database of people in the world, which is not a capability we’re building.”
To be clear, NameTag has been around for about six weeks. Meta has been building NameTag since early 2025, licensing its facial recognition software, assembling a full detection and matching pipeline, and adding it to the tens of millions of phones the app runs on, where it remained until WIRED reported on it. Although it wouldn’t have been possible for people to actually use it without specialized tools, WIRED’s analysis of the Meta AI code, as well as that of two independent experts, found a technically functional facial recognition system within the app that millions of people have on their phones. This system still exists, if you take Bosworth’s discussion of it seriously.
