The UK government will deploy facial age estimation (FAE) AI at its borders starting next year to determine the ages of asylum seekers who lack identity documents. This is the first known government use of FAE in an immigration context. Children misclassified as adults lose legal protections and can be placed in adult detention facilities.
WIRED and Lighthouse Reports obtained an internal UK government test report on FAE systems. The findings are damaging: the systems regularly misidentify children as adults and show measurable bias against the demographic that makes up the largest share of age-assessed migrants in 2025, per Home Office data. The government proceeded anyway.
Read the full investigation for the specific bias breakdowns, the technical methodology Lighthouse Reports used to analyze the AI outputs, and the legal framework that permits deployment despite known failure rates. The gap between what the internal report found and what the government chose to do is the story.
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