Charities hit out at UK plans to use AI to assess age of asylum seekers

A group of more than a hundred refugee children's organisations has warned that government plans to use artificial intelligence (AI) and facial recognition technology (FRT) to assess the age of young asylum seekers could result in more children being wrongly placed in adult prisons, accommodation, or detention centres. The warning follows the announcement of a £322,000, three-year contract with Akhter Computers Limited to develop and test facial age estimation technology before rolling it out in 2027. 

An as-yet-unpublished report by the Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium cautions that the technology cannot account for physical variations caused by trauma, under-nutrition, and exhausting journeys. The consortium does not rule out AI entirely but argues that it must serve only an advisory role rather than replace comprehensive assessments by social workers. The report also highlights that existing evidence shows that AI suffers from the same biases and inaccuracies as human decision-making and could create a false sense of certainty in complex cases.

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