Researcher documents 'agentic flooding' as AI-drafted filings swamp public services in 11 jurisdictions

Public services around the world are seeing sharp jumps in applications, complaints, and petitions as AI tools make it easier to fill forms and file claims. In the United Kingdom, complaints to the housing ombudsman rose from 2,600 in 2022 to just over 7,000 last year. The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau saw complaints grow fivefold over the same period, and Brazilian judicial petitions and German parliamentary petitions showed similar increases. Researcher Chris Schmitz is tracking the pattern under the term agentic flooding in a paper to be presented next month at the AI Ethics and Society conference. He examined 84 cases of potential flooding across 11 jurisdictions and found broad evidence that AI is changing how people interact with public services, from welfare applications to judicial appeals. All the affected services share online access points that an AI assistant can use. Schmitz distinguishes between filings that are clearly adversarial and those from legitimate applicants using AI to pursue claims they would otherwise have abandoned. Rather than treating the surge as AI-generated spam, he frames it as a rare opportunity to remake social services for the AI era. The harder question, TechCrunch notes, is what agencies should do in response, since throttling submissions risks shutting out the very people the services exist to help. The full dataset is publicly hosted.