AI 'agentic flooding' hits public services, Schmitz finds

The surge in public service requests has a clear timeline: submissions were roughly flat before 2022, then rose at increasing speed as AI technology diffused. The UK housing ombudsman saw complaints more than double from 2600 in 2022 to just over 7,000 last year, while the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau saw 5x growth. Similar jumps occurred in Brazilian judicial petitions and German parliamentary petitions.

This pattern echoes what bug-bounty services experienced last year, when companies found their inboxes flooded with low-quality LLM-generated reports. But there's a crucial difference: Schmitz says most new public service applications come from real people with legitimate claims who were previously deterred by administrative burden — the work of applying was too forbidding. Now that AI can lift that burden, it may be an opportunity to remake services in a more AI-friendly way.

The outcome hinges on whether agencies can distinguish legitimate claims from adversarial filings while managing five times more applicants with the same budget. Schmitz sees reason for optimism, arguing this could be the moment to rethink how these processes look — but the paper stops short of saying AI directly causes the surge, and most cases show no sign of slowing, suggesting the volume will likely keep rising for years.