UK Home Office ran AI through asylum cases for a year, largely in secret
A watchdog report and new reporting show AI tools summarise asylum interviews, flag sham marriages and guess ages — often undisclosed, understudied, and already linked to a wrongful refusal.
What happened: A report from Open Rights Group, backed by MPs from Labour, the SNP and the Greens, says the Home Office has quietly built AI into immigration enforcement: spotting sham marriages, estimating asylum seekers' ages, scanning phones, summarising interviews and country evidence, and running border surveillance with facial recognition, drones and satellites. Separately, Wired reports a government watchdog, the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, is weighing a formal probe into two specific tools after lawmakers and researchers questioned their accuracy and the department's secrecy.
Why it matters: These systems help decide whether someone gets to stay in the UK or is sent back to a country where they fear harm. A UK judge has already accused the Home Office of citing an 'AI hallucinated' document to refuse a Moroccan woman and her child's claim. Open Rights Group found the real error rate in AI-generated interview summaries is higher than the government's published 9%, and there's no quality check at all on the tool summarising country policy evidence used in these same decisions.
How it works, plainly: Two tools, Asylum Case Summarisation and Asylum Policy Search, run on OpenAI's GPT-4 via Microsoft Foundry. Caseworkers use them to condense asylum interview transcripts and search country-of-origin evidence, saving roughly an hour per case when used together, by government estimate. The Home Office insists humans still make the actual decisions and the tools only assist. But applicants are not told AI touched their file, and researchers say neither tool appears on the government's public register of algorithmic decision-making systems, despite rules requiring that listing.
The rollout: Piloting began in late 2024 as Labour tried to clear a backlog of about 100,000 asylum cases; the department has since halved the number awaiting a first decision, though appeals have surged. Open Rights Group's six-month investigation relied on freedom of information requests the Home Office repeatedly resisted, often citing national security. The matter is now with the UK's data regulator, which is investigating the department's refusal to explain how staff use and were trained on the tools, and the border watchdog may add its own inspection next year.