Home Office asylum refusal cited apparent AI hallucination

A UK upper tribunal judge has said the letter the Home Office used to refuse a Moroccan woman's asylum claim 'bears hallmarks consistent with the use of artificial intelligence' and that the country-conditions document the refusal leant on may not exist at all, according to the Guardian. The judge went further: if the citation was an AI 'hallucination', that would be 'analogous to relying on bogus evidence' and represent a procedural irregularity.

The woman, who fled forced underage marriage and extreme violence including rape and who says she fears being killed by her husband, had her claim rejected partly on the strength of a country policy and information note (CPIN) on Morocco dated July 2021. When the case reached the upper tribunal, the judge noted no such document could be located in the public domain and the Home Office's own country policy and information team was unable to confirm its existence. No CPIN on Morocco has been published since 2017.

Pressed on the point after the Guardian asked whether the document existed, the Home Office reportedly first sent a link to an archive that did not contain it, then produced a different document altogether: an unpublished internal country information note that referenced, among other things, Morocco having granted 40,000 child marriage exemptions in 2018 and lacking explicit criminalization of marital rape. That was not the source cited in the original refusal letter.

Take the specifics as reported, not settled. The judge did not conclude definitively that AI wrote the letter, only that its features were consistent with it, and the Home Office's public line is that asylum claims are 'always considered on their individual merits and based on the latest evidence.' What the reporting does not tell you is which tool, if any, was used, how widespread the practice is inside Home Office casework, or how many other refusal letters cite the same phantom document.

The useful thing here for anyone working in or around AI-assisted government decisions is that this is now a template. Every lawyer representing an asylum claimant has a clean line to ask whether each cited authority actually exists, and every department letting a model draft consequential letters should assume that question is coming.