The UK will scan asylum-seekers’ faces for age checks—despite knowing the tech is flawed

Summary

Age verification is consuming the Internet . Starting next year, the British government is planning to introduce facial age estimation—where AI scans your face and suggests how old you are —to help determine the age of asylum seekers arriving at the United Kingdom’s border. Many asylum seekers arriving in the UK will not have documents proving their age, and if children are incorrectly classed as adults, they can be stripped of some legal protections and placed in adult-only detention centers. The investigation also found that the Home Office, which oversees UK immigration and policing, disbanded a scientific committee designed to advise it on broader age estimation methods while it was exploring the introduction of AI. “We were keen to highlight the inadequacies of facial age estimation, but this opportunity was not presented to us, and then the committee was shut down,” says Tim Cole, an emeritus professor of medical statistics at University College London’s Institute of Child Health and former committee member. The spokesperson adds that the committee was disbanded due to requiring “different fields of expertise.” While the Home Office says face scanning is designed to be an “additional” tool for border officers and won’t “replace or overrule human judgment,” it did not answer questions about how it plans to use the technology in real-world environments. “In cases of uncertainty,” the spokesperson says, “individuals will always be treated as children until a further assessment is conducted.” The UK government first announced its plans to use face age estimation alongside border staff judgments to assess migrants in July 2025. Tens of thousands of people make asylum claims in the UK each year, with many arriving in the country after dangerous , physically demanding journeys in small boats crossing the English Channel. Currently, border staff who doubt the age of someone claiming to be under 18 can assess their physical appearance, answers to interview questions, and general demeanor, to make an initial decision about their age. The Home Office has indicated that FAE technology would help immigration officers who are making age assessments while working at the point of first encounter. The photo quality was apparently so bad that the report was unable to determine if that or the physical condition of asylum seekers at arrival had more of an impact on the algorithms’ age estimation results. The internal report concluded that more needed to be done to study the impacts of stress that asylum seekers endure before arriving at their destination. “Children seeking asylum have often suffered unimaginable trauma,” says Martha Dark, the co-executive director of rights group Foxglove.