Report: AI quietly embedded across UK Home Office immigration decisions
A report by Open Rights Group, backed by cross-party MPs, finds that the UK Home Office uses AI across a range of sensitive immigration decisions, from detecting sham marriages and assessing asylum seekers' ages to border surveillance through facial recognition and drones, without the public knowing the full extent of its use. The report, based on freedom of information requests and parliamentary questions, says the department routinely invokes national security to withhold details, and warns that AI tools risk replicating bias precisely because a key driver behind their use is stricter immigration enforcement. The group is calling for regulation banning AI uses that risk human rights violations, such as ChatGPT-style tools in asylum applications, as well as a public register of the government's AI tools. For a business or compliance consultant, the case shows how hard it is to oversee AI in high-stakes decisions when the body deploying it resists transparency, exactly the scenario the EU AI Act tries to prevent by explicitly classifying migration as a high-risk use case.
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