AI Agents Are Flooding Public Services With Requests, Researcher Finds

In the United Kingdom, complaints to the housing ombudsman more than doubled, rising from 2,600 in 2022 to just over 7,000 last year, according to a TechCrunch report on the research. The United States Consumer Financial Protection Bureau saw complaints grow fivefold over the same period, and Brazilian judicial petitions and German parliamentary petitions recorded similar jumps.

Chris Schmitz is tracking the rise as part of a broader project. In a paper scheduled for presentation next month at the AI Ethics and Society conference, he examines 84 cases of potential flooding across 11 jurisdictions and reports broad evidence that AI tools are changing how people interact with public services. The services studied range from welfare applications to official judicial appeals, all of which offer online channels that an AI assistant could use. For methodological reasons, Schmitz's paper stops short of saying AI is directly causing the surge in submissions. But most of the 84 cases follow the same basic arc: filings were roughly flat before 2022, then rose at increasing speed as AI technology spread. In most cases that growth has not slowed, which suggests it will likely continue for years.

Schmitz said the trend follows from improvements in what AI systems can do and how widely they are available. "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 a lot of dragging 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 increase in volume resembles what many bug-bounty programs experienced last year, when companies found their inboxes flooded with low-quality reports generated by large language models. Those reports rarely identified significant security issues, but companies were still obligated to review each one, consuming resources. Public services managing five times as many applicants on the same budget could face a comparable strain.

Schmitz, however, said the new public-service submissions differ from the bug-bounty flood in an important way: most 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 were not claiming benefits before, he said, it may be because the work of applying was too forbidding, a problem the policy world calls administrative burden. With AI lowering that burden, he sees an opportunity to remake the services in a way that accommodates AI-assisted applicants.

He described the task as major and largely unstarted, but said it is grounds for optimism. "A big part of making AI go well is being able to detail out what the good version of things looks like," he said. "And anyone who's ever used ChatGPT to do the tax return knows that there's a good version here where you're being helped. This could be the moment to say, 'we need to rethink pretty much everything about how this process looks.'"

Editor's Summary

Complaints and applications to public services in Britain, the United States, Brazil and Germany rose sharply after 2022, which researcher Chris Schmitz links to a pattern he calls agentic flooding. His paper, due at the AI Ethics and Society conference, covers 84 cases across 11 jurisdictions and stops short of proving AI caused the increases, though it finds sustained growth. Schmitz says most new filings come from legitimate claimants and argues the surge is an opening to redesign administrative systems for AI-assisted use.