Public sector organizations across the United Kingdom are experiencing a significant surge in artificially generated complaints, letters, and formal requests, a phenomenon researchers have termed “agentic flooding” or “AI clog.” The proliferation of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini has made it substantially easier for members of the public to draft formal correspondence without specialized knowledge, but the ease of creation has resulted in an administrative burden for recipient organizations.
Local authorities, courts, employment tribunals, and other government bodies report that volumes of AI-generated communications have increased dramatically in recent months. Staff members processing these requests note that while individual pieces of correspondence take mere moments for users to produce, responding to them consumes considerable time and resources. The Information Commissioner’s Office observed that many public authorities received elevated numbers of requests in 2025, with AI-drafted submissions frequently characterized by excessive length, repetitive content, and unclear or overly broad scope. Prior to widespread chatbot adoption, typical complaints submitted to local authorities averaged approximately two pages; currently, the average has grown to around twenty pages, with some submissions exceeding two hundred pages.
“Every sector is experiencing very similar issues,” according to leadership at organizations representing affected workers. The longest communications often contain inaccurate legal references, hallucinated case law citations, or jurisdiction-inappropriate precedents pulled from international sources. Employment tribunal claims opened between April and June increased 28 percent compared with the prior year, reaching 14,000 cases from individual claimants, while concluded cases declined during the same period, contributing to a backlog of 70,000 open single claims.
While artificial intelligence was promoted as a productivity enhancement tool that would automate routine tasks and free human workers for creative endeavors, the practical outcome in the public sector has been the opposite. Organizations are straining to manage inflated workloads with existing budgets and staffing levels, as the ease of AI-assisted complaint generation has overwhelmed traditional response capacity. Administrators and legal professionals note that even clearly AI-generated requests lacking accuracy must be formally processed and answered by human personnel.
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