The UK Will Scan Asylum-Seekers’ Faces for Age Checks—Despite Knowing the Tech Is Flawed

The UK plans to use facial age estimation technology, where AI scans faces to predict age, to assess asylum seekers at the border starting in 2027. Internal government tests of this technology show it regularly misclassifies children as adults and performs significantly worse on Sub-Saharan Africans, the largest group of migrants undergoing age assessments, with errors averaging 4.6 years for young women from that region. If asylum seekers are wrongly classified as adults, they can lose legal protections and be placed in adult detention facilities. The government is proceeding with the technology despite knowing these flaws and despite a scientific committee being disbanded before it could fully advise on the risks.