UK to trial AI face scans to estimate asylum seekers’ ages

The Home Office is pressing ahead with facial age estimation for asylum cases despite warnings that a false result could decide whether a vulnerable person is treated as a child or an adult. The technology is slated for trial throughout 2026 and for border use in 2027, with officials saying it will support initial age decisions when identity documents are missing.

The department says the system is only a supplementary tool, not a replacement for human judgment. It has also acknowledged that performance can vary by ethnicity and skin tone, and its own guidance still describes the technology as experimental. That matters because age assessments in the UK can determine access to child-only accommodation and safeguards, or exposure to adult detention, removal, and other procedures.

The plan moved forward with a £322,000 contract awarded on 28 May 2026, running from 1 June 2026 to 31 May 2029, to support work with Cognitec Systems GmbH and Akhter Computers Limited. Cognitec, based in Dresden, has scored well in National Institute of Standards and Technology benchmarking, but those tests measure mean absolute error across mugshot, visa, and border-crossing image datasets rather than certainty. The institute’s age-estimation program remains open and regularly updated, underscoring that this is an evolving benchmark, not a settled legal standard.

Rights groups say the 16-to-18 threshold is exactly where such systems are least reliable. Human Rights Watch and Foxglove say the Home Office’s own figures suggest an error margin of about 2.5 years at that boundary, and Human Rights Watch says internal testing found worse performance for some groups, notably Africans. That is a serious problem for asylum seekers, whose faces may appear older because of trauma, malnutrition, dehydration, sleep deprivation, and the strain of dangerous journeys.

More than 60 civil society groups have urged the Home Office to halt the plan, saying it is discriminatory, inaccurate, privacy-invasive, and potentially unlawful. The open letter argues that a child wrongly classified as an adult could be placed in adult accommodation, detained, or removed, while an adult wrongly classified as a child could be given access to child-only protections and services. The wider dispute reflects a long-running strain in UK age assessment, where officials have relied on visual judgments and Merton-compliant assessments; critics say facial scanning risks turning uncertainty into apparent precision at the very point where error carries the heaviest consequences.