On 6 January 2026, Craig Guildford, chief constable of West Midlands Police, sat before the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee for the second time in five weeks. MPs wanted to know where one line in his force’s paperwork had come from: a reference to a match between West Ham United and Maccabi Tel Aviv. No such match had ever been played.
At his first appearance, on 1 December, he had put the line down to “social media scraping” and denied that an AI search was involved. This time, he said, the force had got to the bottom of it: the match had turned up in a Google search, and the force did “not use AI.”
Three days later, on the Friday afternoon, he learned otherwise. On 12 January he wrote to the committee that the error “arose as result of a use of Microsoft Co Pilot.” He apologised, and said his earlier belief had been honestly held.
The invented match was one error among several, and the chain that carried it into an official document had started three months earlier.
In October 2025, Birmingham City Council’s Safety Advisory Group had to advise whether away fans could attend Aston Villa’s home match against Maccabi Tel Aviv on 6 November. Police advice, the committee later found, was the main driver of its decision. The force had first planned for away fans to come. Its reading of Maccabi’s away match in Amsterdam in November 2024 became the tipping point towards a ban.
After the group’s first meeting, on 7 October, its chair asked the force for a “slightly more clear rationale,” noting that there had been challenge. A check, it seemed, was working. The force replied on 10 October with more detail about Amsterdam, including that 2,000 Dutch police had been deployed. Some of that information, MPs later learned, had come from an AI search. On 16 October the group decided away fans would not be allowed.
The written report for the group’s meeting on 24 October went further. It included the West Ham match, and put the police deployed in Amsterdam at 5,000, a figure Guildford later admitted was a “professional assumption” rather than a verified fact.
Sir Andy Cooke, the chief inspector of constabulary, found the spoken briefings behind the decision broadly accurate, with one discrepancy. The letter and the report were not: they held inaccurate statements, including exaggerations about the fans’ behaviour in Amsterdam. He concluded in a preliminary review that “confirmation bias” had influenced how the force reached and communicated its recommendation.
The committee agreed, and treated the AI material as part of a wider failure. The force had not done even basic due diligence on what it received, and senior officers had repeated inaccurate information to the advisory group and to MPs. The Copilot use had been unauthorised, and although it was known inside the force by 6 January, the chief constable had not been told.
Guildford retired on 16 January. The acting chief constable blocked Microsoft Copilot on force systems “until further notice.”
As for the advisory group, MPs wrote that it had accepted the police recommendation on so little evidence that it had to ask for more justification after the fact. “Instead, West Midlands Police were given the opportunity to further harden their evidence, to the extent that false claims were made.”