AI Agents Are Flooding Public Services With New Requests

Summary

AI tools that help people complete forms and file complaints are coinciding with sharp increases in public-service requests in several countries. Complaints to the UK housing ombudsman rose from 2,600 in 2022 to just over 7,000 the following year, while complaints to the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau grew fivefold over the same period; Brazilian judicial petitions and German parliamentary petitions also increased. Researcher Chris Schmitz is studying the pattern under the term “agentic flooding” in a paper covering 84 potential cases across 11 jurisdictions. The cases include welfare applications, judicial appeals, and other online services accessible to AI assistants. His methodology does not establish that AI directly caused the increases, but many cases were broadly flat before 2022 and then accelerated as AI became more available, with most showing no clear slowdown. Schmitz says the growth includes adversarial or low-quality submissions, but that most observed applicants appear to be real people making legitimate claims. AI may therefore be reducing administrative burden that previously discouraged eligible people from applying. At the same time, public agencies could face substantially more work without matching budgets, similar to the resource strain companies experienced when low-quality, AI-generated bug reports increased. Schmitz argues that the surge should prompt a redesign of public services for an AI-enabled environment, although the scale and implementation of that task remain unresolved.