UK Home Office May Face Investigation Over Use of OpenAI Tech

The Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI), which monitors the Home Office’s management of borders, immigration, and customs, has asked digital rights nonprofit Open Rights Group (ORG) to share more information on the tools as it draws up plans for the topics it will inspect next year, campaigner Sara Alsherif tells WIRED. ORG’s findings come from a six-month investigation into the tools, which involved 11 parliamentary questions, two ministerial letters, and 10 public records requests that attempt to pry details from the Home Office, which has withheld details on the tools.

The ICIBI tells WIRED it cannot confirm what topics are under active consideration before it publishes its annual inspection priorities, but it says it is aware of concerns about the use of AI tools and pointed to its findings last year that one of the tool’s “effectiveness and reliability were varied.”

“Asylum decisions are made by trained caseworkers, with AI tools used only to assist in navigating interview records and policy information. They cannot be used in isolation and do not make decisions on claims,” a Home Office spokesperson tells WIRED in an email. “We regularly monitor the performance of these tools alongside our established quality-assurance processes, and have already committed to publishing updated evaluations on their roll out.”

The Home Office uses the Asylum Case Summarisation (ACS) and Asylum Policy Search (APS) tools, built on OpenAI’s 2023 GPT-4 large language model and Microsoft Foundry, to summarize transcripts of interviews with asylum applicants and information about their countries of origin, according to documents obtained by ORG. The immigration and law enforcement authority started piloting these tools in late 2024 as the Labour government tried to clear a backlog of around 100,000 asylum cases, while staying on top of the tens of thousands of new applications the UK receives each year. While the department has made significant progress, halving the number of people waiting on an initial decision in the year through June, the number of appeals against decisions has ballooned.