Public services around the world are seeing enormous jumps in applications and complaints. The reason is simple: AI makes it easier to fill forms and file requests. Researcher Chris Schmitz calls this trend “agentic flooding,” and it is reshaping how governments handle citizen requests.
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 saw 5x growth in complaints over the same period. There were similar jumps in Brazilian judicial petitions and German parliamentary petitions.
What Is Agentic Flooding?
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. His research finds 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.
The Scope of the Research
Schmitz looked at services ranging from welfare applications to official judicial appeals. They all have online services that could be accessed by an AI assistant. For methodological reasons, Schmitz’s paper stops short of saying AI is directly causing the surge of new applicants.
But most of the 84 cases follow the same basic arc. Submissions were roughly flat before 2022, then rose at increasing speed as AI technology diffuses. Crucially, most cases have not seen that growth slow down, suggesting it will likely keep rising for years to come.
Why AI Makes Filing Easier
For Schmitz, it is easy to see how the increasing skills 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 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.”
Lessons From Bug Bounty Programs
The jump in volume is similar to what many bug-bounty services also experienced last year. Companies found their inboxes flooded with low-quality reports generated by LLMs. The reports rarely contained significant security issues, but companies were still obligated to vet the reports as they came in, presenting a significant drain on resources.
It is easy to imagine public services facing a similar problem, as they manage 5x more applicants with the same budget. But where the bug bounty programs were flooded with worthless submissions, Schmitz says most of the new applications to public services are coming 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 said.
The Administrative Burden Opportunity
If those people were not claiming the benefits before, it may have been because the work of applying was too forbidding. The policy world calls this administrative burden. Now that AI can lift that burden, it could be an opportunity to remake many of these services in a more AI-friendly way.
It is a major task, which we mostly have not begun to tackle, but Schmitz sees it as reason for optimism.
“A big part of making AI go well is being able to detail out what the good version of things looks like. 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,” Schmitz says. “This could be the moment to say, ‘we need to rethink pretty much everything about how this process looks.'”
Key Statistics at a Glance
| Region | Service | Change Since 2022 |
|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | Housing ombudsman complaints | 2,600 to 7,000+ |
| United States | Consumer Financial Protection Bureau complaints | 5x growth |
| Brazil | Judicial petitions | Similar jumps |
| Germany | Parliamentary petitions | Similar jumps |
What Comes Next
The research covers 84 cases across 11 jurisdictions, with most showing no sign of slowing down. As AI tools become more capable and accessible, public services will need to adapt to higher volumes while distinguishing legitimate claims from adversarial filings.
Schmitz’s work suggests the response should not be to simply block AI-generated submissions. Instead, services should be redesigned for an era where AI assistance is the norm. That could mean better online portals, clearer application processes, and systems built to handle volume without sacrificing fairness.
The AI agents flooding public services are not going away. The question is whether governments will treat this moment as a crisis or an opportunity to build something better.
