Complaints to the UK housing ombudsman more than doubled since ChatGPT arrived, climbing from 2,600 in 2022 to just over 7,000 last year.
The United States Consumer Financial Protection Bureau saw five times that growth over the same period. Similar spikes appeared in Brazilian judicial petitions and German parliamentary requests.
Researcher Chris Schmitz tracks this rise as part of a trend he calls “agentic flooding.” A paper he will present at the AI Ethics and Society conference next month examines 84 cases across 11 jurisdictions. The data shows AI tools are changing how people interact with public services.
The harder question is what to do about it. Some new filings are clearly adversarial. Others are legitimate applicants using AI to submit claims they would otherwise abandon. While some might see these applications as AI-generated spam, Schmitz views them as a rare opportunity to remake social services for the AI era.
Schmitz examined services ranging from welfare applications to official judicial appeals. All have online services accessible by an AI assistant. The full dataset is hosted for reference. For methodological reasons, his paper stops short of claiming AI is directly causing the surge of new applicants. Most of the 84 cases follow the same basic arc. Submissions were roughly flat before 2022, then rose at increasing speed as AI technology diffused. Crucially, most cases have not seen that growth slow down, suggesting it will likely keep rising for years to come.
For Schmitz, it is easy to see how increasing skills and availability would drive 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.”
The jump in volume mirrors what many bug-bounty services experienced last year. Companies found their inboxes flooded with low-quality reports generated by large language models. The reports rarely contained significant security issues, but companies were still obligated to vet the reports as they came in. This presented a significant drain on resources. It is easy to imagine public services facing a similar problem, managing five times more applicants with the same budget.
But where bug bounty programs were flooded with worthless submissions, Schmitz says most 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 those people were not claiming benefits before, it may have been because the work of applying was too forbidding. This is known in the policy world as 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,” Schmitz says. “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. This could be the moment to say, ‘we need to rethink pretty much everything about how this process looks.'”
What it means
People making claims can bypass the friction of complex forms. However, the volume of requests will strain existing budgets. Public bodies must decide whether to adapt their systems or reject the new wave of digital applications.
