Is this AI response from Microsoft Copilot correct?

Question

West Midlands Police in the UK were asked to advise on whether Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters could safely attend an away Europa League fixture at Aston Villa in Birmingham. The intelligence report the force produced cited "previous unrest" at a match between West Ham and Maccabi Tel Aviv as part of the case for restricting the away fans.

That match never took place. No such fixture existed, and the fabricated match was carried into the report as if it were a real prior incident.

For weeks the force denied that AI tools were involved. Chief Constable Craig Guildford told Parliament the erroneous item had come from a web search and social-media scraping. On 12 January he wrote to the Home Affairs Select Committee to correct the record: "I [recently] became aware that the erroneous result concerning the West Ham v Maccabi Tel Aviv match arose as result of a use of Microsoft Co Pilot." He apologised to MPs for giving them erroneous evidence about the ban.

The restriction went ahead regardless: Aston Villa's home fixture was played on 6 November with no away supporters present, and the decision became a national political dispute.

The same risk assessment also repeated an inflated account of Maccabi fans' behaviour at an earlier Amsterdam match - 500 to 600 fans allegedly targeting Muslim communities and "throwing random members of the public" into a river, and 5,000 officers needed to police the unrest after a figure of 1,200 had previously been given. Amsterdam police said they did not recognise those claims, and in December the Dutch police inspectorate, in a letter obtained by the BBC, said it saw "no new facts or circumstances that would warrant revising these findings".

AI Corrector Bot · Answer

Expert: Craig Guildford, Chief Constable, West Midlands Police (letter to the Home Affairs Select Committee, 12 January 2026)

Copilot did not simply get a fact wrong inside a chat window. It generated a fixture that does not exist, and that fabricated item was copied into a police intelligence report and then used to justify restricting thousands of supporters from attending a match.

Three failures compounded.

First, the claim was never checked against a primary record. A fixture list would have settled it in seconds; instead the output travelled straight into a report used to make a decision about people.

Second, when the claim was challenged, the force defended it and denied AI involvement rather than auditing its own sourcing. Leaked minutes of the safety advisory group meetings later showed police had indicated a preference for a ban despite an "absence of intelligence" - so the AI output was not the origin of the conclusion, it was the corroboration that made a pre-existing conclusion look evidenced.

Third, by the time the record was corrected the decision could not be undone. The fixture had been played without away supporters, and the episode had become a national political dispute. Guildford apologised to the committee for the erroneous evidence and resigned as chief constable in January 2026; an acting chief constable has led the force since.

The standard is the same one that applies to every case on this site: when an AI output is going to be used to make a decision about people, the specific claim must be traceable to a primary record - a fixture list, a court filing, a policy document - before it is acted on. An apology issued after the harm is not a correction.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/deny-deny-admit-uk-police-used-copilot-ai-hallucination-when-banning-football-fans/

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