The UK Will Scan Asylum-Seekers’ Faces for Age Checks—Despite Knowing the Tech Is Flawed
Age verification is consuming the internet. From social media bans in Australia to porn restrictions in half of US states, for many having to prove
Age verification is consuming the internet. From social media bans in Australia to porn restrictions in half of US states, for many having to prove their age to access websites is becoming an everyday requirement. But one of the key technologies underpinning many of these age checks is about to seep into the offline world—with potentially life-changing consequences for people having their age predicted by AI. This story was produced in partnership with Lighthouse Reports and The Independent. 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. The move is believed to be the first time that a so-called facial age estimation (FAE) system has been used in this way. 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.
An investigation by WIRED and Lighthouse Reports, in collaboration with The Independent, has obtained an internal UK government report detailing its tests of FAE technologies. It shows how the systems regularly mistake children for adults and appear to contain serious bias problems, which directly impact the largest group of migrants subject to age assessments in 2025, according to data from the Home Office. The investigation raises questions about the effectiveness of the technology and whether it should be deployed in such high-stakes scenarios. The findings also come as the second Trump administration and governments around the world increasingly adopt anti-migrant policies while spending billions on surveillance technology that is often deployed against vulnerable people who have little knowledge of its use, how it works, or ways they can challenge it. The leaked Home Office document obtained by Lighthouse Reports largely details the “best” performing of seven facial age estimation algorithms that the department tested last year, although it does not directly name the companies behind them.
The report found that the system performed significantly worse when it was used to estimate the ages of Sub-Saharan Africans compared to other groups. Sub-Sarahan Africans are the largest group of migrants entering the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats in recent years and had more age assessments raised in 2025 than cohorts from other regions, according to Home Office data. For female Sub-Saharan Africans, the age that the system guessed was off by an average of 4.6 years, meaning that a 13.5-year-old girl could be assessed as an 18-year-old adult. 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 BriefWire