AI agents are flooding public services with new requests

But where the bug bounty programs were flooded with worthless submissions, 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.

It’s a major task, which we mostly haven’t begun to tackle, but Schmitz sees it as reason for optimism.

“A big part of making AI go well is being able to detail out what the good version of things looks like. And anyone who’s ever used ChatGPT to do the tax return knows that there’s a good version here where you’re being helped,” Schmitz says. “This could be the moment to say, ‘we need to rethink pretty much everything about how this process looks.'”