AI tool will lead to more child refugees being treated as adults, charity warns

‘Racist bias’ overestimating ages in Home Office’s facial-recognition software will lead to solo children being housed with adults, says Human Rights Network Flawed and racialised models that underpin the AI-powered age-detection systems to be introduced by the British government will endanger children, rights groups and children’s charities have warned. Urging ministers to reverse plans to introduce facial age-estimation technology to screen migrants, critics have warned that black children arriving from conflict zones are at risk of being of thrust into the adult system. Maddie Harris, of the Humans for Rights Network, said the charity had worked with hundreds of children who were already being wrongly filtered into the adult system during age assessments at borders carried out by immigration officers. 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