Home Office accused of secrecy over AI use in asylum system

Summarised from 2 outlets · Updated 27 Oct, 00:20 · Archive

The Home Office is embedding AI tools across asylum and immigration decisions while withholding details of how they work, campaigners and MPs say.

The Open Rights Group has published a report documenting how AI has been embedded across the Home Office immigration system in near-total secrecy. Tasks now involving AI range from determining the age of asylum seekers based on facial features to detecting potential sham marriages, checking phones of new arrivals, and conducting border surveillance through live facial recognition and AI-powered drones and satellites. The technology is also used to summarise asylum interviews and to prioritise cases through a tool called Identify and Prioritise Immigration Cases (Ipic).

Campaigners say the government is stonewalling freedom of information requests and invoking national security to withhold details. Spot-checks carried out within the Home Office found that an AI tool summarising interview transcripts with asylum seekers was failing basic accuracy tests. Despite this, asylum seekers are not told when AI has been used to summarise their cases.

Cross-party MPs, including Labour's Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the Scottish National Party's Pete Wishart and the Green Party's Siân Berry, are pushing for transparency. Ribeiro-Addy called on the Home Office to publish equality and data protection assessments, explain staff training on the tools, and allow independent validation of their performance. She said the Home Office should not use AI in decisions affecting people's lives 'until it can show the tools are accurate, that proper safeguards are in place, and that it can explain clearly how they are used'.

How it is being reported

• ‘Digital hostile environment’: AI secretly being embedded across Home Office, report claimsTasks from determining asylum seekers’ ages to border surveillance now involve AI, says Open Rights Group AI has been embedded across the Home Office in near-total secrecy, reinforcing the so-called hostile environment for immigration, according to research. Tasks from the detection of potential sham marriages to determining the age of asylum seekers and checking through the contents of phones of new arrivals now involve use of the technology, according to a report by Open Rights Group (ORG). Continue reading...The Guardian · 27 Oct, 00:01
• Home Office urged to break with ‘toxic record of failure’ over AI use in asylum claimsCampaigners and MPs push government to come clean about how AI tools are being used at the border and in asylum casesThe Independent · 27 Oct, 00:01

In this story: Home Office · Open Rights Group · Bell Ribeiro-Addy · Pete Wishart · Siân Berry

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