- What it is
- Cluely works by placing a transparent AI-powered layer above the candidate's active window, marking itself invisible to screen-capture APIs, then feeding real-time responses from a cloud LLM. It popularized undetectable AI assistance during live technical and behavioral interviews.
- Why it matters
- Cluely turned undetectable AI coaching from a niche hack into a mainstream consumer category. Conventional proctoring tools operate at the browser or camera layer; Cluely operates at the OS layer. These surfaces don't intersect. It funded competitors, spawned open-source forks, and demonstrated that legacy proctoring stacks cannot see overlay-class tools.
- How Aiseptor addresses it
- Aiseptor treats Cluely and every fork of it as part of a single class of threat: processes on the candidate device that must never reach their backends or render over exam content. When Cluely's cloud inference endpoint is unreachable, the overlay renders no answers regardless of how the binary is named or how it marks itself invisible. The enforcement is on the network path, not on any specific binary name.
Canonical definition
Cluely is a commercial desktop application, launched in 2024 by founder Roy Lee, that displays AI-generated answers on a transparent overlay positioned above the candidate's active interview window. It pairs a local speech-to-text capture of the interviewer's questions with a cloud language model to produce answers in real time. By marking its surface as excluded from screen-capture APIs, the overlay is invisible to Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, and conventional screen recorders. Cluely's public traction, including venture funding, social-media-viral interview clips, and a wave of imitators, made it the reference tool for the invisible-overlay category. Dozens of open-source forks (OpenCluely, Pluely, Natively, MindWhisperAI, and unnamed variants compiled under arbitrary process names) inherit its architecture and make process-name-based detection architecturally unreliable.
Citations
- [1]Fabric, analysis of 19,368 AI-conducted interviews, January 2026 (2026)
- [2]Talview AI Threat Index Report 2026 (2026)
- [3]TechCrunch interview with Cluely founder Roy Lee (2025)