AI agents flood public services with 5x more requests
ai agents are making it easier for people to file complaints and applications, resulting in a 5x growth in complaints to the us consumer financial protection bureau, and public services are struggling to keep up.
ai agents are driving a significant increase in requests to public services worldwide, with the us consumer financial protection bureau seeing 5x growth in complaints and the uk housing ombudsman receiving over 7,000 complaints last year, up from 2,600 in 2022. researcher chris schmitz is tracking this trend, which he calls agentic flooding, and notes that most cases have not seen growth slow down. while some new filings may be adversarial, many are legitimate applicants using ai to file claims that would otherwise be abandoned.