Expert: Upper Tribunal judge, Immigration and Asylum Chamber (decision dated 14 July 2026) The question in this case was not whether an AI tool wrote a sentence. It was whether a document the government relied on to send a woman and her child back to a country they had fled actually exists. It does not. In a decision dated 14 July, the Upper Tribunal judge said of the Country Policy and Information Note at the centre of the refusal: "It appears that no such CPIN has ever existed." He added: "No such document has been located in the public domain and moreover the Home Office's country policy and information team has been unable to confirm its existence." Reviewing the refusal letter itself, the judge found it "bears hallmarks consistent with the use of artificial intelligence", and continued: "It may therefore transpire that references to country information note Morocco July 2021 in that letter are a result of an AI 'hallucination'. If so that would represent an extremely serious failing on the part of the respondent." Relying on a document that does not exist, he said, was "analogous to relying on bogus evidence", and he treated the citation as a procedural irregularity. What makes the case consequential is how far the citation travelled. A first-tier tribunal judge had already relied on the document's stated existence to reject the woman's earlier appeal. An invented source did not stay inside one paragraph of one letter - it was carried into judicial reasoning as an established fact about conditions in Morocco. The Home Office's own handling did not resolve it. Asked where the note was, the department initially sent a link to an archive in which the document could not be found, then produced something different: an unpublished internal country information note (CIN) that had never been disclosed to the court, and which does not conclude that Morocco is safe for the woman's forcible return. That internal note records that in 2018 exemptions were granted covering 40,000 child marriages, one-fifth of all marriages that year; that Morocco's laws do not explicitly criminalise marital rape; and that women who report it may be criminalised for sex outside marriage if the authorities disbelieve them. That is not a document that supports the refusal it was produced to support. The pattern is not confined to one letter. The same department is expanding its use of AI - it has been exploring a central "AI as a service" capability and is trialling facial age-estimation software on people without verifiable identity documents, including asylum seekers whose age is disputed. Its own published evaluation of AI trials in asylum decision-making assessed two tools: one summarising asylum interview transcripts, one searching country policy information. The evaluation reported time savings and no measurable effect on decision quality, but it also recorded that 9 per cent of the transcript summaries produced during the pilot were inaccurate or missing information and had to be removed before use. The word "hallucination" appears nowhere in that evaluation's findings, caveats or recommendations, even though the risk has now been raised directly in relation to the department's asylum casework. In March 2026 the government launched a 40 million pound AI research lab whose stated aims include addressing hallucination, unreliable memory and unpredictable reasoning in current AI models. The practical lesson is narrow, and it is the opposite of a technical one. A citation in an official decision is read as evidence, not as a suggestion. Where an AI tool touches the drafting of a refusal letter, the existence of every document it names has to be verified against the publisher's own records before the letter leaves the building - because the cost of not doing so is not a bad sentence, it is a decision about whether a woman and her child can be sent back to the violence they fled. The Home Office said its asylum claims "are always considered on their individual merits and based on the latest evidence" and that the home secretary is "restoring order and control" to the asylum system. The woman's case continues. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jul/28/home-office-used-ai-hallucinated-information-to-refuse-asylum-claim-judge-suggests