US government asylum claim denied due to AI translation error
A Pashto-speaking refugee's asylum bid was rejected by a US court after an AI translation tool incorrectly changed "I" to "we" in her written statement. This created a perceived contradiction with her oral testimony, leading to the denial of her asylum claim.
An automated translation tool swapped the "I" pronouns in the woman's statement to "we," creating a discrepancy that led a judge to reject her asylum claim.
Key facts
- What
- A Pashto-speaking refugee's asylum bid was rejected by a US court after an AI translation tool incorrectly changed "I" to "we" in her written statement.
- Incident date
- Jan 1, 2020
- Who
- US Government
- Failure mode
- Hallucination
- AI surface
- Machine Translation
- Severity
- High
What happened
A US court denied the asylum claim of a Pashto-speaking refugee because of a discrepancy between her oral testimony and her written application. An automated translation tool used for the written document had incorrectly swapped first-person singular pronouns for first-person plural pronouns. This error led the judge to perceive the applicant's account as inconsistent, resulting in the rejection of the claim.
What broke inside the model
- 01 · TriggerA user asks for a fact, a citation, or a figure.
- 02 · Model stepThe model writes a fluent, confident answer.
- 03 · Control gapNothing ties the claim back to a real source.
- 04 · FailureA fabricated fact ships as if it were verified.
- 05 · ConsequenceThe false claim reaches a customer, a court, or the public.
Confidence holds, and even spikes, as the claim detaches from any source.
The neural machine translation system failed to accurately translate Pashto pronouns. Specifically, the model incorrectly replaced the word for "I" with "we" in the applicant's written statement.
What it cost
Sources
- PressAI translation jeopardizes Afghan asylum claimsrestofworld.org
- PressAI's 'insane' translation mistakes endanger US asylum casestrtworld.com
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/government-asylum-claim-denied-translation-errorAI Failure Index. "US government asylum claim denied due to AI translation error" (FI-0390). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/government-asylum-claim-denied-translation-error (indexed Jun 9, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0390. Full dataset at /data.
Note from Realm Labs, the Index steward
How Realm fits
- Prism
- OmniGuard
- AI Detection & Response (AIDR)
This entry sits in the index's predictive wing: a system that scores, ranks, perceives, or steers rather than generates. Realm's runtime layer is built for the generative and agentic systems now moving into these same decision seats, where it watches a model's internal state and holds an unsupported claim or an unchecked action before it commits. The control gap on this record, an automated decision that reached people with no runtime check in front of it, is the same gap. The index keeps predictive failures on the record because the pattern carries straight into the systems shipping today.