AI Agents Are Flooding Public Services With New Requests
As AI makes it easier to fill out 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 have 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 complaints grow fivefold over the same period. Brazilian judicial petitions and German parliamentary petitions saw similar surges.
'Agentic Flooding': A Growing Trend
Researcher Chris Schmitz is tracking this 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 how people interact with public services.
The harder question is what to do in response. While some of the new filings are clearly adversarial, others come from legitimate applicants using AI to file claims that would otherwise have been abandoned. Where some might see AI-generated spam, Schmitz sees a rare opportunity to remake social services for the AI era.
Schmitz looked at services ranging from welfare applications to official judicial appeals, but all share a common trait: online intake systems that can be accessed by an AI assistant. (The full dataset is hosted here for reference.) For methodological reasons, Schmitz's paper stops short of saying AI is directly causing the surge. But most of the 84 cases follow the same basic arc β submissions were roughly flat before 2022, then rose at increasing speed as AI technology diffused. Crucially, most cases have not seen that growth slow down, suggesting volumes will likely keep rising for years to come.
Why the Surge Is Accelerating
For Schmitz, it's easy to see how the increasing capabilities and availability of AI would drive increased usage.
"People are finding out that this is something one can do, and incrementally, it is just getting easier to do it," he said. "Before, it might have been a question of dragging a lot of context together and prompting ChatGPT 3.5 very precisely. It may now be a question of just pasting or taking a photo of a letter with your Claude app and getting a pretty good response in one shot."
The jump in volume mirrors what many bug-bounty services experienced last year, as companies found their inboxes flooded with low-quality reports generated by LLMs. Those reports rarely contained significant security issues, but companies were still obligated to vet each one, draining resources. It's easy to imagine public services facing a similar problem as they manage five times more applicants on the same budget.
But where bug-bounty programs were flooded with worthless submissions, Schmitz says most of the new applications to public services come from real people with legitimate claims.
"The vast majority of cases we find are people who are entitled to claim for something, claiming for that thing," he told TechCrunch.
If those people weren't claiming benefits before, it may have been because the work of applying was too forbidding...
via TechCrunch AI