Britain's public institutions are being gummed up by a rising tide of AI-generated correspondence, according to a detailed Guardian investigation published Saturday, in a phenomenon commenters have started calling "AI clog." Local authorities, courts, schools, MPs' offices and transport bodies report that chatbot-drafted complaints, appeals and freedom of information (FoI) requests are multiplying their workloads — and the volume shows little sign of slowing.
"It started as a trickle in 2024 and now it's an onslaught," Hollie Wickens, a senior caseworker in a Labour MP's office, told the Guardian, estimating that half the emails her office receives are now some form of AI. Despite a decade of experience, she says the requests have become more complex and more time-consuming to process. For more context on this story, see our ongoing artificial intelligence updates.
When Everyone Has a Free Lawyer
The mechanics are simple: tools like ChatGPT — which turns four later this month — Claude, Copilot and Gemini have effectively given anyone with an internet connection a free legal adviser, administrator or complaints department. What once required hours of research and specialist knowledge can now be generated in seconds.
"Everyone's got a free lawyer now," is how the founder of one UK technology startup put it to the Guardian. His company is facing an employment tribunal challenge from a former employee, and he expects to have spent £30,000 in legal fees by the time the case is heard.
The numbers back the anecdotes up. Employment tribunal claims opened between April and June soared 28% compared with a year earlier — 14,000 cases from single claimants, according to the most recent government figures — while concluded cases fell, leaving 70,000 open single claims at the end of June.
Deborah Evans, chief executive of Lawyers in Local Government, which represents 5,600 lawyers working in councils, told the paper that complaints averaging about two pages before the chatbot era now routinely run ten times longer. "You get some huge ones," she said. "The worst one I'm aware of at the moment is about 200 pages long." Unlike private companies, she notes, local authorities have one pot of money and do not receive extra funding when complaints surge.
'Agentic Flooding' Gets a Name
Researchers have started labeling the deliberate version of this phenomenon "agentic flooding" — including teams at the centre for digital governance at the Hertie School in Berlin, the Cooperative AI Foundation and GovAI. But much of what institutions are seeing is not coordinated at all: ordinary residents, employees and claimants simply find that AI tools make their complaints sound, in Evans' words, "incredibly professional, very formal."
The UK's information regulator has noticed too. The Information Commissioner's Office found that many public authorities received more requests in 2025, and observed that AI-generated requests can be "very long, repetitive and contain unrelated comments or misdirected demands." Crucially, the ICO cautions that requests which appear AI-drafted — even with inaccuracies — still must be answered by humans.
AI's weaknesses compound the problem. Evans says AI-drafted complaints sometimes cite case law from the wrong jurisdiction entirely. "It might find some great case law from Canada or somewhere," she said, adding that AI tools are "also slightly prone to hallucinations so it does occasionally make things up."
From Parking Appeals to Parliament
The effects reach into nearly every corner of public administration. Enfield council's leader, Alessandro Georgiou, reported a significant uptick in parking appeals from residents using AI to challenge decisions. Transport for London received a record 4,769 FoI requests in 2025-26 — a 5% increase on the previous peak — and its audit and assurance committee has noted a rise in appeals that appear AI-generated, "which often contain highly technical and often inaccurate assertions and assumptions."
Westminster is struggling too. Vonnie Sandlan, head of office for Labour MP Graeme Downie, said staff dealing with surging AI-generated requests are "stretched to the limits and working more hours than they are paid." Her office has stopped responding to automated "click to email your MP" campaigns so it can focus on constituents. The GMB union, which represents MPs' staff, says that where offices keep figures, casework has "doubled or more."
Institutions Respond — With AI
Some bodies are fighting fire with fire. Wiltshire council is exploring using AI to summarize long emails and draft initial responses, while a committee at Stroud district council has discussed using Microsoft's Copilot to help write reports. Some ombudsman services are imposing word limits or redesigning online forms to cap how much can be submitted. Researchers have floated more defensive measures still: charging fees for requests or blocking bots from government websites.
The UK government, for its part, has issued civil servants guidance on using AI tools — verify the facts, don't input personal data, and make sure humans review the work and take final decisions.
Technology journalist Jamie Bartlett, who has collected many accounts of the phenomenon, told the paper that public bodies and companies will likely need to use some form of AI to filter submissions or set stricter rules about what they accept. "Otherwise I worry they're going to get completely overwhelmed," he said.
A Productivity Paradox
There is an irony here. AI tools get genuine credit for some of the UK's better-than-expected GDP growth this year, and they meaningfully lower barriers for people who would struggle to draft a complaint or appeal at all — something Sandlan herself acknowledges. The same capability that makes individuals more productive makes institutions slower: every AI-drafted 20-page complaint still needs a human to read it, check it and answer it.
As the Guardian's reporting makes clear, the bottleneck has simply moved from the writing to the reading — and the readers are running out of hours in the day.
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