Complaints to the United Kingdom's housing ombudsman more than doubled since ChatGPT launched, jumping from 2,600 in 2022 to just over 7,000 last year, according to a new paper by researcher Chris Schmitz set for presentation next month at the AI Ethics and Society conference. The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau saw complaints grow fivefold during the same timeframe, with similar spikes appearing in Brazilian court filings and German parliamentary petitions. Schmitz describes the phenomenon as "agentic flooding" and argues it represents a rare chance to redesign social services for an era when artificial intelligence tools can handle the paperwork that previously stopped people from filing legitimate claims.
Schmitz examined 84 separate instances of potential flooding across 11 countries, focusing on services ranging from welfare applications to official judicial appeals, all of which maintain online portals accessible to AI assistants. The research stops short of declaring AI the direct cause for methodological reasons, but most of the 84 cases display the same pattern: submissions held roughly steady before 2022, then climbed at accelerating rates as AI technology spread. Critically, most cases haven't shown any slowdown in growth, pointing toward continued increases for years ahead.
"The vast majority of cases we find are people who are entitled to claim for something, claiming for that thing," Schmitz told TechCrunch. The researcher explained that AI's growing capabilities and accessibility are driving increased usage, noting that "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 paper indicates that unlike bug-bounty programs flooded with worthless AI-generated security reports last year, most new public service applications come from real people with valid claims who previously found the application process too burdensome.
The surge presents public agencies with a challenge: managing five times more applicants using unchanged budgets. But Schmitz frames the increase as an opportunity rather than a crisis, arguing that if legitimate claimants weren't applying before, the barrier was what policy experts call administrative burden—the sheer difficulty of filling out forms and gathering documentation. Now that AI can remove that obstacle, governments face a decision about whether to maintain systems designed for an analog world or rebuild them for AI-assisted constituents. "A big part of making AI go well is being able to detail out what the good version of things looks like," Schmitz said. "This could be the moment to say, 'we need to rethink pretty much everything about how this process looks.'"
The paper acknowledges the work of reimagining these systems has barely begun, but Schmitz remains optimistic that the flood of applications could force the necessary redesign. He points out that anyone who's used ChatGPT for a tax return understands there's a beneficial version of this future where AI genuinely helps people access services they're entitled to receive. The question isn't whether AI will continue making it easier to file claims—the data suggests that's inevitable—but whether public institutions will adapt their processes before the mismatch between capacity and demand becomes unsustainable. Agencies that dismiss surging applications as spam risk turning away constituents exercising legitimate rights, while those that embrace the shift could build more accessible systems from the ground up. The distinction matters because administrative burden has historically excluded the people who need public services most, and AI's ability to lift that burden could reshape who actually receives government assistance.