ICIBI Seeks Details on Home Office AI in Asylum — SkimNews
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- ICIBI asked the Open Rights Group for more information on ACS and APS as it draws up next year’s inspection priorities; the inspector says it cannot confirm which topics are under active consideration before publication.
- Open Rights Group said its six-month inquiry used 11 parliamentary questions, two ministerial letters and 10 public-records requests to obtain details the Home Office withheld; it found ACS’s unfit-summary rate significantly above the pilot’s published 9% error rate and no quality control for APS.
- ACS and APS were built on OpenAI’s 2023 GPT-4 model and Microsoft Foundry to summarize asylum interviews and country-policy information; they were piloted in late 2024 as the government tackled roughly 100,000 backlogged cases, with about one hour saved per case when used together.
- Home Office says trained caseworkers make decisions and the AI tools cannot be used in isolation; a UK judge accused it in July of citing an “AI hallucinated” document to refuse a Moroccan woman and her child’s asylum claim.
- Open Rights Group says asylum seekers are not told when ACS or APS is used and cannot contest an incorrect summary; Cloisters lawyers wrote that the lack of disclosure may breach UK data rights laws.
- Information Commission is investigating the Home Office’s refusal to tell the Open Rights Group how staff use and were trained on ACS and APS, after the group and the Public Law Project submitted their findings.
- Public Law Project identified ACS and APS as two of 11 high-risk government AI systems absent from the public repository required by the UK AI Playbook; researcher Caroline Selman said other government tools were being used without being publicized.
Why it matters: The Home Office gains roughly an hour per case from the tools, but ORG says ACS failures exceed the pilot’s 9% error rate and APS has no quality control. With a judge already accusing the department of citing an AI-hallucinated document, applicants bear the second-order cost when life-changing claims rest on inaccurate, non-transparent records.
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