Public bodies across Britain are being swamped by complaints, requests and legal challenges drafted by chatbots, in a flood insiders have begun calling “AI clog”.

The pattern was first reported by The Guardian on 8 November 2026, as covered by Global 1 News, and affects MPs’ offices, local councils, schools, courts and lawyers. What began as a small rise in 2024 has become a daily deluge, staff say, and the systems built to handle complaints were never designed for the volume now arriving.

Half of one MP office’s emails

Hollie Wickens, a senior caseworker in a Labour MP’s office with a decade of experience in parliamentary casework, said about half of the emails her team now receives show signs of having been drafted by artificial intelligence.

“It started as a trickle in 2024 and now it’s an onslaught,” she said. Chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and Gemini have, in effect, given members of the public a free legal adviser and administrative assistant, allowing a polished, formal-sounding complaint to be produced in minutes. ChatGPT itself turns four later this month.

The problem, staff say, is that writing has become almost free while reading and replying still take the same amount of work. A letter that once took an evening to research and write can now be generated in seconds, but every one of them must still be read, checked and answered.

Two pages become 200

The clearest sign of the change is length. Deborah Evans, chief executive of Lawyers in Local Government, which represents 5,600 council lawyers, said that before chatbots became common, a typical complaint to a council ran to about two pages. Now most are around ten times that length, and she knows of one that ran to about 200 pages.

“AI is a wonderful tool that enables people to do things very, very quickly and it can make a complaint sound incredibly professional, very formal,” Evans said. But the extra length brings extra work: the letters are often repetitive, packed with bullet points and legal jargon, and can cite law from the wrong jurisdiction — Canadian case law, for example, in a complaint to a UK council — or include inaccurate or invented details.

The Information Commissioner’s Office, the watchdog for information rights, has found that many public authorities received more requests in 2025, and that requests that appear to be AI-generated tend to be very long, repetitive and full of unrelated comments or demands aimed at the wrong place. Even inaccurate AI-drafted requests still have to be answered by a human, the watchdog has warned.

Tribunals and transport feel it too

The flood is not limited to councils. Employment tribunals, already carrying a backlog, saw single-claim cases opened between April and June rise by 28 percent compared with the previous year, to about 14,000, while the number of concluded cases fell, leaving around 70,000 open single claims by the end of June.

Transport for London logged a record 4,769 freedom of information requests in 2025-26, a rise of 5 percent on its previous peak. In Enfield, councillor Alessandro Georgiou said residents are increasingly using AI-generated letters to challenge council decisions, with a significant rise in appeals against parking fines.

One technology start-up founder, whose former employee is contesting a dismissal, told The Guardian he expected legal fees of around £30,000 for the tribunal case. Jim Moore, an employee-relations expert, said many AI-generated complaints are “unnecessarily verbose”, tend to inflate minor incidents into major offences, and often fail to say what remedy the complainant is seeking.

What researchers call “agentic flooding”

Researchers at the Hertie School’s Centre for Digital Governance in Berlin, working with the Cooperative AI Foundation and GovAI, have given the phenomenon a more technical name: “agentic flooding”, the coordinated, automated inundation of public bodies. They warn that the sheer volume of machine-assisted messages risks overwhelming the institutions citizens rely on.

Councils say they receive no extra funding for the extra work, so longer letters mean slower answers for everyone, including people with genuine, non-AI-generated concerns. Some authorities are responding with AI of their own: Wiltshire Council is investigating using AI to summarise lengthy correspondence, and Stroud District Council in Gloucestershire has used tools such as Microsoft Copilot to help with report writing.

Other ideas under discussion include requiring a disclaimer when AI is used to draft an official complaint, although that would need legislation to be enforceable. For now, the work of reading, verifying and answering the flood falls on public servants who were already, by most accounts, stretched thin.