Yes, substantially. A Stanford study found AI detectors wrongly flagged around 61% of essays by non-native English speakers as AI-generated — the majority of them, not a rounding error.
It happens because detectors score predictability, and writing in an additional language tends to mean safe, correct, well-drilled constructions rather than idiom. That reads as low-surprise text.
Why the bias is structural, not incidental
This isn't a bug that a better model fixes. The measurement itself is the problem.
A detector scores how closely your word choices track what a language model would predict. Fluent idiomatic English is full of unexpected turns — an odd collocation, a colloquialism, a sentence that changes direction. Learned academic English is not: it is careful, conventional and drilled, precisely because that's what's taught and what's safe. The strategy that makes a second-language essay correct is the same strategy that makes it look machine-generated to a predictability score.
Students with the least margin for error — often paying international fees, often with a visa tied to their enrolment — face the highest false-positive rate from a tool their university applies automatically.
The 2026 picture
The fear tracks the risk. A Studiosity/YouGov survey that year found 75% of students who use AI worry about being falsely accused, rising to 81% among international students. HEPI published on the fairness gap twice over the summer, and its July 2026 piece was titled around exactly this problem — catching the wrong students. Its position by August:
A detector score should never be sufficient evidence of misconduct on its own.HEPI, August 2026
Several 2026 Office of the Independent Adjudicator cases involved international students accused on detector evidence and subsequently cleared. That's the recourse working, but only after months of stress that shouldn't have happened.
What this means practically
Two things follow, and neither is “write worse English.”
- Your process evidence matters more than anyone else's. Draft in one continuously-edited document so its version history shows the essay being built over days. If you're asked, that's the answer — and it's far stronger than arguing about a percentage.
- The bias is a legitimate thing to raise. If you're accused, saying so is not an excuse. It's documented, published research, and a panel that ignores it is ignoring the current evidence. This is what to do first.
Using a grammar tool doesn't cause this, incidentally — careful correct prose does. But it does mean keeping your drafts matters more for you than for most people. Our guide on writing essays in your second language goes further into UK academic conventions.
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