AI agents are flooding public services with new requests

AI is changing how people interact with public services. As the technology makes it easier to fill out forms, file complaints and submit applications, agencies around the world are reporting enormous jumps in the volume of requests they receive, TechCrunch reports.

The numbers are striking. In the United Kingdom, complaints to the housing ombudsman more than doubled since the introduction of ChatGPT, rising from 2,600 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, with similar jumps recorded in Brazilian judicial petitions and German parliamentary petitions.

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

The services range from welfare applications to official judicial appeals, but they share one thing in common: all of them have online interfaces that an AI assistant can access. Most of the 84 cases follow the same arc, with submissions roughly flat before 2022 and then rising at increasing speed as AI diffuses. Crucially, most have not yet seen that growth slow down.

For methodological reasons, Schmitz's paper stops short of saying AI is directly causing the surge. But he finds it easy to see how improving skills and availability would drive usage. Before, he said, it might have meant dragging a lot of context together and prompting ChatGPT 3.5 very precisely; now it may be a question of pasting or photographing a letter with a Claude app and getting a pretty good response in one shot.

The harder question is what to do in response. Some of the new filings are clearly adversarial, but many come from legitimate applicants using AI to file claims that would otherwise have been abandoned. "The vast majority of cases we find are people who are entitled to claim for something, claiming for that thing," Schmitz told TechCrunch.

The surge echoes what bug-bounty services experienced last year, when companies found their inboxes flooded with low-quality reports generated by LLMs. Those reports rarely contained significant security issues, yet companies were still obligated to vet each one, draining resources. Public services could face a similar bind, managing 5x more applicants with the same budget.

Unlike the bug-bounty flood, however, Schmitz says most of the new applications to public services are coming from real people with legitimate claims. He sees the surge as a rare opportunity to remake social services for the AI era. The question now is how agencies will separate genuine claims from noise, and whether they will redesign online services before the volume outpaces their capacity.