West Midlands Police Reportedly Relied on Erroneous Copilot-Generated Intelligence in Maccabi Tel Aviv Away-Fan Ban Decision

October 24, 2025

West Midlands Police reportedly used intelligence, potentially generated using AI tools like Microsoft Copilot, that contained errors in their materials to justify banning Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from attending a Europa League match against Aston Villa. The alleged AI-linked mistake referred to a non-occurred match, later acknowledged by Chief Constable Craig Guildford. This incident underscores the importance of responsible AI governance and safe and secure AI practices. For those interested in shaping trustworthy AI and improving its guardrails, join us at Project Cerebellum and help us develop the HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM to Measure and Manage such incidents: JOIN US

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.662, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.639, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.634, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: west-midlands-police
Alleged developer: microsoft
Alleged harmed parties: maccabi-tel-aviv-supporters, jewish-community-in-birmingham-and-the-west-midlands, epistemic-integrity, maccabi-tel-aviv-f.c.

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1400

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

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