AI-powered age-detection systems to be used by the British government will endanger children, rights groups and children's charities have warned, citing flaws and racial bias in the technology.
Charity warns of 'adultification' risk
Maddie Harris of the Humans for Rights Network said the charity had worked with hundreds of children already wrongly filtered into the adult system during border age assessments. In May, the Helen Bamber Foundation revealed that 755 children in 2025 were incorrectly identified as adults on arrival to the UK, according to Home Office figures.
Harris said the introduction of AI was a “cheap process” that would not improve these numbers. “This is not about protecting children – this is about shoring up the decisions that [the authorities] are making,” she said.
30-month margin of error
The government has admitted that even the best systems can have a 30-month margin of error. Harris said this is particularly risky for children from countries such as Sudan and Somalia, who she said were already “adultified” by the system.
“As soon as a child is treated as an adult, they are susceptible to – or exposed, rather – to any of the egregious consequences that the Home Office is applying to adults, such as detention and removal,” she said. Unaccompanied children would be forced into accommodation alongside adults, exposing them to risk and violence from protests targeting asylum seeker accommodation.
Biased technology
In May, the government announced a contract to use facial age-estimation technology developed by Cognitec, a German firm. That system showed bias against sub-Saharan Africans, tending to overpredict the ages of minors, according to an investigation by Lighthouse Reports in June.
The UK-based tech monitor Foxglove said these systems relied on “racist bias” and called on the government not to use children to test experimental technology. The Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium raised concerns about the technology’s ability to assess children who have undergone difficult journeys, noting that trauma can “age” a child’s appearance.
Home Office defends plans
The Home Office plans to use the technology alongside checks by immigration officers. A spokesperson said: “Age assessments are a vital tool in maintaining border security. As part of our work to make this process more robust and consistent, we are exploring cutting-edge AI technology to verify migrants’ ages.”
'Neo-phrenology' criticism
Petra Molnar, co-founder of the advocacy group Migration and Tech Monitor, said this was the latest in a series of failed attempts across Europe to implement tech and AI into border policy. She said previous attempts with AI-powered lie-detection systems had proven to be “snake oil” and did not progress beyond pilot schemes.
Molnar likened the use of facial age-estimation technology to “the study of skulls and skull shapes” by colonial-era scientists, saying that like the discredited 19th-century pseudoscience of phrenology, these systems similarly relied on categorising physical features to determine age. “The context really matters here,” she said. “We know that trauma ages you. We know that malnutrition, dehydration, torture – even just the journey itself – has physical impacts on your face, on your body.” She called it “effectively 'neo-phrenology'” and said relying on imperfect tools is not the solution.
