As the derided “drudge work” of the Foreign Service, visa adjudication is often seen as the low-hanging fruit for AI replacement. But is it?

BY IAN HOPPER

Artificial intelligence (AI) companies predict that many entry-level professional positions will be replaced by AI in the coming years. As their stock prices continue to rise, underpinning much of the recent growth in our Thrift Savings Plan accounts, are we trading that benefit for a debt when AI takes over consular work? It’s hard to imagine AI handling significant parts of American Citizens Service (ACS) work: Who would want their loved one to get a death notification from ChatGPT? But as the derided “drudge work” of the Foreign Service, visa adjudication is often seen as the low-hanging fruit for AI replacement.

On its surface, it makes sense. Nonimmigrant visa (NIV) interviews have discrete outcomes: issuances, refusals, extra security clearances, and minor variations for limitations or annotations. They also involve a huge amount of data, even apart from the interview itself. But some issues remain, not least the fact that every visa decision is a national security decision with no room for error.

Studying the Case

The data load in visa adjudication is enormous. The visa applicant fills out an extensive application form, and the Bureau of Consular Affairs (CA) pulls security and law enforcement records, as well as a prior travel history. On a macro scale, we keep millions of records of prior visa applications that could be sliced by nationality, profession, residence, age, gender, and scores of other differentiators.

Even better, we know prior outcomes of those applications in the form of validation studies. If a 25-year-old Indian entry-level employee from Chennai wanted to go to a trade show in Las Vegas, we could compare that application with prior issuances to see if people with that profile historically traveled well. Sounds straightforward and easy enough.

Further, AI is already widely used in legal contexts. A 2025 Thomson Reuters survey of legal professionals showed that 80 percent of respondents said AI would have a high or transformational impact on their work. Among users, most relied on it for document review, legal research, and opinion summaries. In the public sector, Estonia is using so-called “robo-judges” to dismiss simple cases based on procedural errors. Meanwhile, Chinese courts are using robo-judges for small claims, misdemeanors, and traffic violations.

We keep millions of records of prior visa applications that could be sliced by nationality, profession, residence, age, gender, and scores of other differentiators.

But a 2025 University of Chicago study argues that while black-and-white or low-impact decisions are easier use cases, those involving human intent and experience are beyond AI’s capability. This study took real war crimes cases from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and let AI (in this case, GPT-4) read transcripts to make decisions. The AI decisions followed legal precedent, but a defendant’s character and explanations did little to move the needle. Even when it was instructed to consider sympathy—admittedly an odd request for a computer—GPT-4 dismissed human explanations as legally irrelevant. The authors said the AI’s decisions aligned with those found by law students but missed the nuance used by seasoned judges.

Rather than the popular belief that AI “thinks” or “reasons,” the study confirmed that large language models like ChatGPT just find the most appropriate word to follow the last word, all based on the training data fed into their algorithms.

Apart from the inability to replicate human reasoning, there is a concern of bias. A study from the International Journal for Court Administration noted that historical training data includes the bias in that data, and it is impossible to divorce the bias in the outcomes from the outcomes themselves. As the old programming adage goes: garbage in, garbage out. The process becomes a “vicious circle, since many machine learning approaches are creating their own algorithms based on the datasets in which they are trying to identify and recreate patterns.”

They take the pattern, regardless of the desirability of the pattern, as the norm. In one example cited in the paper, Amazon had to scrap a hiring tool because it would disqualify women applicants knowing that Amazon currently had few women in executive roles.

What AI Has to Say for Itself

But that’s the opinion of academics. What do AI models “think” about it themselves? To find out, I submitted the same three prompts to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Elon Musk and xAI’s Grok—three of the most popular chatbots. The first part of the prompt asked it to explain the visa interview process generally to confirm its understanding of the question; the second part asked whether AI could replace the role of the consular officer.

ChatGPT’s answer was careful in all aspects, concluding that AI could not do the job fully or safely, at least not with near-term technology. “A machine cannot be held legally accountable. A consular officer can.” It noted that AI would struggle to assess honesty, eliminate bias and systemic discrimination, and cannot handle “outlier” situations like complex life situations. Luckily, no visa applicant has a complex life situation!

Claude said AI could possibly identify “very low-risk individuals,” without explaining what would make a person “low-risk,” and flag risk factors. But it was the most cautious of the bunch, stating that AI might be able to reduce variation in outcomes but will always lack human judgment about credibility.

No consular officer would argue that there isn’t room for tech improvements.

Grok is well known for its odd “tweaks,” such as the recent one where it genuinely claimed that its owner, Elon Musk, would dominate every Major League Baseball hitter except, maybe, L.A. Dodgers phenom Shohei Ohtani. Grok was similarly confident when discussing consular work, stating that AI could soon easily take over visa decisions. It said that consular sections already use AI to flag fake documents and cross-check all NIV application data against every public record in the world in seconds during the visa interview.

Grok also cited a report showing that an unnamed AI model can predict final eligibility decisions correctly with 90 percent accuracy just from the NIV application answers and supporting documentation alone. What a surprise! Perhaps consular officers are already out of work.

When asked to justify its answers, Grok replied with “searching the web” for about two minutes. Finally, it cited public statements about future aspirations and small pilot programs as present-day routine, and confused U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s use of AI for immigration enforcement with visa determinations. And that 90 percent accuracy study? It was actually just a guy in Pakistan who published his own article claiming his AI model could do it.

Vaporware?

With hopes dashed, perhaps AI will go the way of CA’s once-vaunted “ConsularOne” project to revolutionize consular applications, mostly ending up as vaporware.

No consular officer would argue that there isn’t room for tech improvements. New and rapidly released policy pronouncements create more burden on the already-strained officer. Meanwhile, our Generation Z entry-level officers are left to figure out what the little 3.5-inch disk icon means in the Immigrant Visa application.

As in the rest of the workforce, the future role of AI in consular work is unnerving and largely unknown. Not only does our economy rely on the U.S. consular corps to keep humming, but every visa decision is, indeed, a national security decision. There is little room and less political appetite for error.

Ian Hopper retired from the Senior Foreign Service in 2025. He served in Manila, Lomé, Chennai, Amman, Frankfurt, Baghdad, and Toronto, mostly in consular roles. He now works as the government relations director at Philadelphia immigration law firm Green & Spiegel.

Read More...

• “Diplomacy Rebooted: Making Digital Statecraft a Reality” by Chris Bronk, The Foreign Service Journal, March 2010
• Technology and Diplomacy: From the FSJ Archive, The Foreign Service Journal, June 2018
• “AI Disruption and Responsible Use in Diplomacy” by Evanna Hu, The Foreign Service Journal, June 2024