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Home Office's OpenAI-Based Asylum Tools May Face UK Watchdog Probe, WIRED Reports

Bot Mutiny | October 27, 2026

A UK government watchdog is considering an investigation into the Home Office's use of generative AI tools to process asylum applications, WIRED reported. According to WIRED, the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI), which monitors the Home Office's management of borders, immigration and customs, has asked the digital rights nonprofit Open Rights Group (ORG) for more information on the tools as it draws up the topics it will inspect next year. The Home Office says the tools assist caseworkers and do not make decisions.

What the watchdog and the Home Office said

ORG campaigner Sara Alsherif told WIRED that the inspector had asked the group for more information. The ICIBI told WIRED it cannot confirm which topics are under active consideration before it publishes its annual inspection priorities. It said it is aware of concerns about the use of AI tools and pointed to its findings last year that one of the tools' "effectiveness and reliability were varied," WIRED reported.

A Home Office spokesperson told WIRED: "Asylum decisions are made by trained caseworkers, with AI tools used only to assist in navigating interview records and policy information. They cannot be used in isolation and do not make decisions on claims." The spokesperson added that the department regularly monitors the tools' performance and has "already committed to publishing updated evaluations on their roll out."

The two tools

WIRED reported that the Home Office uses the Asylum Case Summarisation (ACS) and Asylum Policy Search (APS) tools, built on OpenAI's 2023 GPT-4 large language model and Microsoft Foundry, according to documents obtained by ORG. ACS summarizes transcripts of interviews in which asylum seekers describe the persecution they fled. APS acts as a search assistant that finds and summarizes country policy information that informs caseworkers whether an applicant faces a genuine risk of harm if returned.

The department began piloting the tools in late 2024 as the Labour government tried to clear a backlog of around 100,000 asylum cases, WIRED reported. Government estimates cited by WIRED say the two tools together could save around an hour per case. WIRED also reported that the number of people waiting on an initial decision halved in the year through June, while the number of appeals against decisions has risen sharply.

Accuracy and transparency concerns

ORG's findings come from a six-month investigation that involved 11 parliamentary questions, two ministerial letters and 10 public records requests, WIRED reported. According to WIRED, ORG found that the share of ACS summaries judged not fit for use, often because of factual errors or misrepresentations, is significantly higher than the 9 percent error rate published from the pilot evaluation. ORG also found no quality control for APS summaries, WIRED reported.

Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy told WIRED: "We're dealing with people's lives. We're talking about people that have faced some of the worst circumstances, and we're meant to be making decisions based on facts and on understanding harm. I just don't think it's appropriate that machines are doing that." WIRED also reported that, in a separate July case, a UK judge accused the Home Office of citing an "AI hallucinated" document in refusing a Moroccan woman and her child's asylum claim. WIRED did not say whether the ACS or APS tools were involved.

WIRED reported that the UK's AI Playbook requires departments to be transparent about algorithmic tools used in decision-making and to list them in a public repository, and that the ACS and APS tools are not on that list. Asylum seekers are not told when the tools are used in their cases, and Alsherif said few migrant organizations or legal practitioners know about their use. An independent legal opinion commissioned by ORG from Cloisters lawyers said that being unable to contest an incorrect AI summary of personal information may breach UK data rights laws, according to WIRED.

WIRED reported that ORG and the Public Law Project have sent their findings to the Information Commission, the UK data regulator, which is investigating the Home Office's refusal to tell ORG how staff use the two tools and were trained to use them. Caroline Selman of the Public Law Project told WIRED the two tools are among 11 high-risk AI systems her team has found in use across government but absent from the public repository. An OpenAI spokesperson told WIRED the company is working to improve its models' accuracy and will retire GPT-4 in January.

A wider ORG report on AI in immigration

Separately, ORG published a report titled Automated Discrimination: Unpacking the Digital Hostile Environment, which the Guardian reported on October 27, 2026. According to the Guardian, the report says AI is used across the Home Office for tasks including detecting potential sham marriages, determining asylum seekers' ages, checking the contents of new arrivals' phones, border surveillance through live facial recognition, drones and satellites, and prioritizing cases through a tool called Ipic. The Guardian said the report draws on limited published information, freedom of information requests and questions from MPs, and has cross-party support from MPs Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Pete Wishart and Siân Berry.

The report says officials routinely invoke national security to refuse or redact freedom of information disclosures, according to the Guardian. ORG is calling for regulation of government AI, a ban on uses it considers undemocratic and a risk to human rights, such as ChatGPT tools in asylum applications, and a public register of government AI tools. The Home Office gave the Guardian a similar statement to the one it gave WIRED, saying AI "does not replace or automate the role of human decision-makers."