AI agents are flooding public services with new requests
A researcher finds that AI tools are driving a sharp rise in applications and complaints to public agencies worldwide, with most requests coming from legitimate claimants rather than spam.
Public services in several countries have seen a rapid rise in applications and complaints in recent years, a trend researchers link to the growing accessibility of AI tools like ChatGPT.
In the United Kingdom, complaints to the housing ombudsman have more than doubled since 2022, rising from about 2,600 cases to over 7,000 last year. In the United States, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau saw complaints grow fivefold over the same period. Similar increases have appeared in Brazilian judicial petitions and German parliamentary petitions.
Tracking "agentic flooding"
Researcher Chris Schmitz calls this phenomenon "agentic flooding" and examines it in a forthcoming paper to be presented next month at the AI Ethics and Society conference. He studied 84 cases across 11 jurisdictions showing signs of this pattern. While the paper stops short, for methodological reasons, of directly attributing the rise to AI, most cases show submissions holding roughly flat until 2022, then climbing at an accelerating pace that has not slowed since.
Schmitz notes that AI tools have become progressively easier to use — where earlier models required carefully assembled, precise prompts, users can now simply photograph a letter and get a usable response from an app like Claude in one shot.
A different picture than bug bounties
A similar surge hit corporate bug-bounty programs last year, where a wave of AI-generated, often low-quality reports created extra work for companies still obligated to review each submission. But Schmitz says public services face a different situation: most new applicants are real people with legitimate claims who may previously have been deterred by burdensome application processes.
Schmitz sees this shift as an opportunity to redesign public services to work better with AI tools, rather than treating the surge purely as a burden on agencies.
