West Midlands police admit AI error behind decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from UK match

Admission comes weeks after the Chief Constable repeatedly denied to parliament that any AI tools were involved

West Midlands Police Chief Constable admits that a contentious decision to ban supporters of an Israeli football team from a match in Birmingham was partly informed by CoPilot – and that it made a mistake.

West Midlands police have admitted that an erroneous claim used to help justify the banning of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from a Europa League match in Birmingham originated from a "hallucination" produced by Microsoft's Copilot AI.

In a letter to MPs, the force's chief constable, Craig Guildford, acknowledged for the first time that AI had been used in preparing intelligence material that fed into the controversial decision to bar away fans from Aston Villa's home match against the Israeli club on 6 November.

The admission came weeks after Guildford repeatedly denied to parliament that any AI tools were involved.

The ban, agreed by Birmingham's Safety Advisory Group (SAG) following a meeting in October 2025, was justified by police on public order grounds.

Tensions were already high after a terror attack on a synagogue in Manchester on 2 October, in which several people were killed by an Islamist attacker.

West Midlands police warned that the fixture could trigger serious disorder in the city and pointed to alleged violent behaviour by Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters at previous matches abroad.

Among the examples cited was a supposed fixture between West Ham United and Maccabi Tel Aviv, presented as evidence of a pattern of concern. No such match has ever taken place.

West Midlands police also cited claims about disorder involving Maccabi Tel Aviv fans in Amsterdam, alleging that hundreds of supporters had targeted Muslim communities and that as many as 5,000 officers were required to contain the unrest. Dutch authorities later said those accounts were exaggerated or inaccurate.

The match in Birmingham ultimately went ahead behind closed doors.

For months, the police force maintained that the mistake had arisen through faulty "social media scraping" or simple errors made while searching online.

Appearing before the home affairs select committee in December and again in early January, Guildford was categorical.

"We do not use AI," he told MPs on 6 January.

He said an officer had searched football intelligence systems and, finding nothing, had "basically Googled" to identify previous matches.

That account was abandoned this week.

Writing to Dame Karen Bradley, the chair of the committee, Guildford said he had only recently become aware that the non-existent West Ham fixture "arose as result of a use of Microsoft Copilot" while preparing material for an inspection by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services.

He insisted he had not intended to mislead Parliament.

On Tuesday, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, in a statement to the Commons, described the episode as a "failure of leadership" and stated that she no longer had confidence in Guildford. She said the decision to recommend a ban had been shaped by "confirmation bias", adding that the Amsterdam intelligence used by the force was "exaggerated or simply untrue".

Mahmood also highlighted the contradiction between Guildford's earlier evidence and his latest admission, noting that MPs had been told AI tools were not used, only for "AI hallucination" now to be blamed for a factual error.

Senior Conservatives joined Labour in calling for Guildford to step aside.