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. The government has admitted that even the best systems can have a 30-month margin of error. Harris said this is particularly risky for children, especially those from countries such as Sudan and Somalia, who she said were already “adultified” by the system. “As soon as a child is treated as an adult, they are susceptible to – or exposed, rather – to any of the egregious consequences that the Home Office is applying to adults, such as detention and removal,” she said. Unaccompanied children would be forced into accommodation alongside adults, exposing them to risk and to the violence threatened by the rise in protests targeting accommodation for asylum seekers, she said. In May, the government announced a contract to use facial age-estimation technology developed by Cognitec, a German firm that calls itself “the face-recognition company”. That system