AIFoPa-2026-0025 — The Match Had Not Been Played

On 6 November 2025 Aston Villa were drawn to play Maccabi Tel Aviv at Villa Park in the UEFA Europa League.

A Safety Advisory Group is a panel of the council, the police and other authorities that rules on whether an event may go ahead. The one convened by Birmingham City Council determined that supporters of the visiting club would not be admitted. It is constituted precisely so that no single one of them decides such things alone.

It reached that determination on safety grounds. The safety grounds rested in part on an intelligence assessment supplied by West Midlands Police, which had classified the match as high risk.

The decision drew immediate and considerable political objection, up to and including the Prime Minister. The force has maintained throughout that the decision was not politically influenced. The Bureau’s remit is machinery rather than motive. It records that position and proceeds.

Among the material in the police assessment was an account of disorder at an earlier fixture between Maccabi Tel Aviv and West Ham United.

There is no such fixture. The two clubs have never played one another. On the date of the imagined match West Ham were engaged against Olympiacos of Piraeus.

That detail was established by the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, which is the group of MPs that scrutinises policing.

The account had been produced by Microsoft Copilot, in response to research conducted by officers. It passed into a document intended to inform a decision about several thousand people. At no point did it encounter the question of whether the match described had taken place.

The instrument did not err in its analysis of an event. It supplied an event.

On 6 January 2026 the chief constable of West Midlands Police, Craig Guildford, gave evidence to the Home Affairs Committee. He was asked where the material had come from. He answered that officers had found it through a Google search, and that the search had not involved artificial intelligence. “We do not use AI,” he told the Members.

He believed this.

Six days later he wrote to the committee’s chair, Dame Karen Bradley, to withdraw it. “I 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.”

The letter is a creditable document. It offers a profound apology on his own behalf and on that of Assistant Chief Constable O’Hara. It records that both of them had until the Friday afternoon understood the match to have been identified by way of a Google search. It states that the belief “was honestly held and there was no intention to mislead the Committee”.

The consequences arrived in the order such consequences do. The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said that she no longer had confidence in the chief constable. The disposal of his employment was a matter for the Police and Crime Commissioner.

On 16 January, at fifty-two, Craig Guildford retired from the third-largest police force in England. It was eleven days before a scheduled meeting with that Commissioner.

The acting chief constable then switched Copilot off across the organisation while it was established what had happened.

This is the second occasion this year on which the remedy adopted for an artificial intelligence has been to turn it off entirely. The measure is popular for a reason. It is the only one available to an institution that has discovered it cannot say where its own facts come from.

On 24 February the committee reported. It declined to find that the chief constable had deliberately misled Parliament. It noted specifically that he had not been told, before the January evidence session, that AI had been used to produce the incorrect material.

It observed in the same breath that the use of AI had by that date already been disclosed within the force. A briefing was available to be given and was not given.

It found a remarkable lack of professional curiosity in his failure to check the evidence before appearing. It held that being wrong twice pointed to a wider failure of due diligence rather than to a single misfortune. It recorded what the process had required: two oral evidence sessions and a written correction. That was to arrive at an accurate account of a football match that did not exist.

Microsoft approached the force for further information and reported that it had not been able to reproduce the hallucination.

The Bureau accepts this without difficulty and draws attention to what it means. The sentence which barred several thousand supporters from a stadium cannot now be made to appear again. It was generated once, for one officer. There is no copy of it anywhere except in the report that carried it forward.

This file is kept for a different property from the others. Machines have invented court cases, patients and academic literature, and the archive maintains drawers for each.

The distinctive fact is this. Evidence to a select committee is given under parliamentary privilege, which is a protection against being sued for what is said. An organisation of some eight thousand people was asked, under that protection, whether it had used a particular class of tool. It answered honestly. It was wrong.