AI is flooding public services with new claims and complaints

Public services around the world are seeing enormous jumps in applications and complaints as AI makes it easier to fill out forms and file grievances.

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 US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) saw 5x growth in complaints over the same period, and 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 calls “agentic flooding.” In a paper set to be presented next month at the AI Ethics and Society conference, he examined 84 different 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 about it. Some of the new filings are clearly adversarial, but others come from legitimate applicants using AI to file claims they would otherwise have abandoned; while some might see the new volume as 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, as long as they had online systems an AI assistant could access. For methodological reasons, his paper stops short of claiming AI is directly causing the surge in 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 tools spread. Crucially, most cases haven’t seen that growth slow down, suggesting it will likely keep rising for years.

The jump in volume echoes what many bug-bounty programs experienced last year, when companies found their inboxes flooded with low-quality, LLM-generated reports that rarely contained real security issues but still had to be vetted, draining resources. Public services could face similar strain as they manage several times more applicants on the same budget. But where bug-bounty programs were flooded with largely 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 people weren’t claiming those benefits before, Schmitz suggests it may be because the work of applying was too forbidding — what policy researchers call administrative burden. Now that AI can lift some of that burden, he sees it as a chance to redesign these services to be more AI-friendly, rather than simply a flood to be managed.

Why it matters

If Schmitz is right that most AI-assisted filings are legitimate claims rather than spam, the policy response that matters isn’t fraud detection — it’s redesigning public-service intake systems that were built for a world where applying was hard enough to keep volume low.