AI agents are flooding public services with new requests
techcrunch ·
As AI makes filling forms and filing complaints easier, public services worldwide are experiencing sharp increases in applications and requests. In the UK, housing ombudsman complaints more than doubled after ChatGPT's introduction, from 2,600 in 2022 to just over 7,000 last year, while the US CFPB saw a fivefold rise in complaints over the same period, with similar jumps in Brazilian judicial petitions and German parliamentary petitions. Researcher Chris Schmitz tracks this as "agentic flooding" in a paper to be presented next month at the AI Ethics and Society conference, examining 84 cases across 11 jurisdictions. The paper stops short of directly attributing the surge to AI for methodological reasons, but most cases were roughly flat before 2022 and then rose increasingly as AI diffused, without slowing. Schmitz notes some new filings are adversarial, yet others come from legitimate applicants using AI to submit claims they would otherwise abandon, and he views this as an opportunity to remake social services for the AI era. He compares the volume increase to bug-bounty services flooded by low-quality LLM reports, but says most new public-service applications are from real people with legitimate claims. If people previously did not claim benefits because applying was too burdensome, AI could lift that administrative burden, and Schmitz argues this is a moment to rethink how such processes work.
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