AI agents are increasingly submitting requests to public services, according to researcher Chris Schmitz. 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 United States’ Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) saw 5x growth in complaints over the same period.

Schmitz is tracking this rise as part of a broader trend he called 'agentic flooding.' In a paper set to be presented next month at the AI Ethics and Society conference, he looks at 84 different cases of potential flooding across 11 jurisdictions, finding broad evidence that AI tools are changing the way people interact with public services.

The harder question is what to do in response. While some of the new filings are clearly adversarial, others are the result of legitimate applicants using AI to file claims that would otherwise be abandoned. Schmitz sees the new applications as a rare opportunity to remake social services for the AI era.

"People are finding out that this is something one can do, and incrementally, it is just getting easier to do it … 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," he said.

Schmitz believes the increasing skills and availability of AI will drive increased usage.

The jump in volume is similar to what many bug-bounty services also experienced last year, as companies found their inboxes flooded with low-quality reports generated by LLMs. However, Schmitz says most of the new applications to public services are coming 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 weren’t claiming the benefits before, it may have been because the work of applying was too forbidding — something 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.

Source: techcrunch