Public bodies across Britain are being swamped by a flood of chatbot-written complaints, letters and legal challenges clogging up councils, Parliament and the courts. The phenomenon has been dubbed “AI clog” by commentators, and researchers warn it risks overwhelming the institutions citizens rely on.

Hollie Wickens, a senior caseworker in a Labour MP’s office, described the change in her inbox. “It started as a trickle in 2024 and now it’s an onslaught,” she said. “Half the emails we receive are some form of AI.” She said the machine-drafted correspondence had made requests and complaints much more complex and time-consuming to deal with.

The shift follows the rapid spread of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, which turns four later this month, alongside Claude, Copilot and Gemini. A letter that once took an evening to research and write can now be produced in seconds. Researchers at the Hertie School in Berlin, working with the Cooperative AI Foundation and GovAI, call the pattern “agentic flooding”.

Complaints ten times longer than before

Local authorities are feeling the pressure most directly. Deborah Evans, chief executive of Lawyers in Local Government, which represents 5,600 lawyers working for councils, said every sector was reporting the same problems, from adult social care to missed bins and planning objections, and councils receive no extra funding for the extra work.

Length is the clearest sign of a machine-drafted letter. Before chatbots became widespread, the average complaint received by a local authority ran to about two pages. The majority are now ten times longer, Evans said, and the worst she is aware of runs to about 200 pages. AI tools can also treat a complaint as a legal claim, citing statute and case law that may come from another country entirely. “It might find some great case law from Canada or somewhere,” Evans said.

The Information Commissioner’s Office found that many public authorities received more requests in 2025, and noted that AI-generated requests can be very long and repetitive, and harder to identify what information is being asked for. Even so, requests which appear to be AI-drafted still need to be answered by humans.

Record requests and rising tribunal claims

Transport for London received a record 4,769 freedom of information requests in 2025-26, a 5 per cent increase on the previous peak in 2023-24, with a noted rise in appeals believed to be AI-generated. Employment tribunal claims opened between April and June rose by 28 per cent compared with a year earlier, reaching 14,000 cases from single claimants, according to the most recent government figures, leaving 70,000 open single claims at the end of June.

MPs’ offices are also struggling. Vonnie Sandlan, head of office for Graeme Downie, the Labour MP for Dunfermline and Dollar, said dealing with the surge had left her staff exhausted and working more hours than they are paid. Her office has stopped answering automated “click to email your MP” campaigns to focus on constituents’ own requests. The GMB union, which represents MPs’ office staff, has found soaring casework levels to be widespread. “AI is not lightening the load in MPs’ offices,” said Lisa Gillmore, president of the union’s MPs’ and peers’ staff branch. “Where offices keep their own figures, that casework has doubled or more.”

Genuine cases caught in the backlog

The surge is not only an administrative headache. The Independent has reported that employment tribunal filings rose 39 per cent in the first three months of this year, with complainants now waiting until 2029 for their cases to be heard. Journalist Sam Freedman described it as a collective action problem: for any one person it is easier to complain using AI, but if everyone does it, every outcome gets worse because decisions take so long.

Councillor Richard Clewer, chair of the Local Government Association’s public service reform and innovation committee, said longer, more complex AI-generated complaints were increasing administrative burdens at a time of significant resource pressure. Consumer champion Helen Dewdney, who runs the blog The Complaining Cow, warned that AI-written complaints carry huge pitfalls for the people sending them. Alongside the spurious complaints are genuinely aggrieved people empowered by AI to engage with the process, only to find themselves blocked by the backlogs.

What public bodies are doing about it

Some ombudsman services are now imposing word limits for complaints or designing online templates to restrict how much information can be attached. Wiltshire council has said it is exploring using AI tools to summarise long emails and draft initial responses, while Stroud district council has discussed using Microsoft’s Copilot for report writing. Technology journalist Jamie Bartlett said public bodies would probably have to use some form of AI to start filtering things out, or set stricter rules on what they will accept. “Otherwise I worry they’re going to get completely overwhelmed,” he said.