Public services across the globe are facing an unprecedented wave of applications and complaints as artificial intelligence makes it easier for citizens to navigate complex bureaucracy. New research indicates that the widespread availability of AI agents is fundamentally altering how individuals interact with government agencies, leading to a phenomenon known as agentic flooding.
As AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude become more sophisticated, they are being used to fill out forms, draft legal petitions, and file official grievances. While this provides a new level of accessibility for the average person, it is also placing a significant strain on the infrastructure of public institutions that were not designed for such high volumes of automated or semi-automated input.
The rise of agentic flooding
Researcher Chris Schmitz has been documenting this trend in a paper scheduled for presentation at the upcoming AI Ethics and Society conference. Schmitz identifies 84 distinct cases of potential flooding across 11 different jurisdictions. He describes the trend as agentic flooding, a term that captures the surge in volume created when individuals use AI agents to act on their behalf.
The research analyzed a wide variety of public interactions, including welfare applications, judicial appeals, and parliamentary petitions. The data shows a consistent pattern: submission numbers remained relatively stable until late 2022, at which point they began to climb rapidly as generative AI technology became a mainstream tool.
Global statistics show a sharp rise
The impact of AI-assisted filing is visible in the statistics provided by several major regulatory and public service bodies.
In the United Kingdom, the Housing Ombudsman reported a dramatic increase in complaints. In 2022, the office received approximately 2,600 complaints. By the following year, that number had more than doubled to over 7,000.
In the United States, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) experienced even more dramatic growth, with complaints increasing fivefold over the same period. Similar trends have been observed in Brazil, where judicial petitions have spiked, and in Germany, where there has been a significant jump in petitions sent to parliament.
According to Schmitz, the growth in these submissions has not yet slowed down, suggesting that public services may face even higher volumes in the coming years as AI tools become more integrated into daily life.
Lowering the administrative burden
The primary driver behind this surge is the reduction of what policy experts call the administrative burden. Traditionally, filing a formal complaint or applying for government benefits required a significant investment of time, a high level of literacy, and the ability to navigate opaque legal language. These hurdles often discouraged people from pursuing legitimate claims.
AI has lowered these barriers significantly. Schmitz points out that the process has moved from complex engineering to simple, intuitive actions.
"People are finding out that this is something one can do, and incrementally, it is just getting easier to do it," Schmitz said. He noted that while early iterations of the technology required precise prompting, current tools allow users to simply take a photo of a letter with an app like Claude to generate a professional and accurate response in a single step.
Legitimate claims versus automated spam
The sudden increase in volume has led some to compare the situation to the challenges faced by bug bounty programs. Many cybersecurity initiatives have recently struggled with a flood of low-quality, AI-generated security reports that rarely contain valid issues but still require manual vetting, draining resources.
However, Schmitz distinguishes the public service surge from mere digital noise or spam. His research suggests that most of the new filings are not adversarial. Instead, they represent real people seeking services or redress to which they are legally entitled.
"The vast majority of cases we find are people who are entitled to claim for something, claiming for that thing," Schmitz told TechCrunch.
While the increased volume is difficult for agencies to manage with existing budgets, it also highlights a historical gap where many citizens were effectively locked out of public services by the sheer difficulty of the application process. AI is now acting as a bridge for those individuals.
Rethinking public service for the AI era
The current situation presents a dilemma for governments: they must find a way to process a massive increase in requests without simply dismissing them as automated spam. Schmitz argues that rather than fighting the trend, this is an opportunity to redesign public services to be more compatible with AI.
"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 said. "This could be the moment to say, ‘we need to rethink pretty much everything about how this process looks.’"
The goal for the next generation of public infrastructure may be to move away from legacy forms and toward systems that can efficiently handle agent-to-government interactions.
What happens next
As AI technology continues to diffuse through the population, the pressure on public services is expected to intensify. Agencies will likely need to adopt their own AI tools to triage and process the influx of requests, leading to a future where AI agents on the citizen side interact directly with AI systems on the government side.
For now, the research by Schmitz and the data from organizations like the CFPB and the UK Housing Ombudsman serve as a wake-up call. The era of high-friction bureaucracy is ending, and the systems that replaced it will need to be prepared for a world where every citizen has a digital assistant capable of filing a formal petition in seconds.
More information on the specific cases tracked by Schmitz can be found at his research site: https://chrisschmitz.ai/flooding.
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