AI agents are flooding public services with new requests

As AI makes it easier to fill forms and file complaints, public services around the world are seeing enormous jumps in applications and other requests.

In the United Kingdom, complaints to the housing ombudsman more than doubled since the introduction of ChatGPT, rising from 2600 in 2022 to just over 7,000 last year. The United States’ Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) saw 5x growth in complaints over the same period. There were similar jumps in Brazilian judicial petitions and German parliamentary petitions.

Researcher Chris Schmitz is tracking this rise as part of a broader trend he called “agentic flooding.” In a paper set to be presented next month at the AI Ethics and Society conference, he looks at 84 different cases of potential flooding across 11 jurisdictions, finding broad evidence that AI tools are changing the way people interact with public services. 

The harder question is what to do in response. While some of the new filings are clearly adversarial, others are the result of legitimate applicants using AI to file claims that would otherwise be abandoned. While some might see the new applications as AI-generated spam, Schmitz sees it as a rare opportunity to remake social services for the AI era.