How AI is breaking the British state

The British state is struggling. Railways go unbuilt and potholes unfilled. Welfare bills go up and shoplifters go uncollared. Andy Burnham, the new prime minister, says he can get Whitehall moving; but then again, so did the previous guy. Yet the British state’s ability to function is about to get dramatically worse—a warning to rich democracies everywhere. Citizens frustrated by the poor deal they get from the authorities are turning to artificial intelligence to file objections and appeals, and claim their dues. The resulting deluge of complaints, and demands, will overwhelm bureaucracies built for the age of the post and the telephone. Too little is being done to prevent the state from drowning. This inundation has been dubbed “agentic flooding”, and its tides are lapping at bureaucracies everywhere, from tax appeals to welfare claims to parking tickets. The waters are rising alarmingly fast in Britain. As we report this week, while worries about AI dwell on the threats to safety and jobs, the backlog in employment tribunals has quietly risen by 55% in a year, in large part due to AI-fuelled claims. Demand for emergency injunctions has surged 100-fold. And the AI tide has only just begun to come in. Britain has long pioneered new political models, from the welfare state in the 1940s to the “third way” in the 1990s. It is also unusually vulnerable to the march of AI-armed citizens, because its administrative traditions favour the written submissions that AI is so good at drafting. And so the state must now innovate once again. The good news is that some in Mr Burnham’s cabinet grasp the scale of the challenge. Whether they can rise to it will show whether Britain can once again be a model to emulate, or a cautionary tale. Amid low growth, an ageing population and rising defence bills, the state is sputtering in many ways, leaving voters convinced that they are getting a raw deal. But those familiar fiscal problems are at least slow-moving and can be forecasted. Agentic flooding is different. It strikes fast and where you least expect. It does not just damage the public finances; it will also clog the cogs that drive the machinery of state. AI is superb at dealing with bureaucracy. It can digest small print, ferret out loopholes and draft appeal letters in seconds. Autonomous AI agents will accelerate the trend, filing tax complaints with minimal intervention. Unlike humans faced with officialdom, AI agents will never lose their temper—or the will to live. Officials complain about AI “slop” and hallucinations, but as the technology improves they will face the opposite problem: demands as well-crafted as a first-class lawyer’s. At first sight this looks like a cracking result for fed-up citizens. No one likes parking tickets. The poor could exercise their lawful rights as successfully as the sharp-elbowed middle classes do today. Yet it threatens to become a tragedy of the commons. If the state is overwhelmed and cannot function, everyone loses. When 20th-century governments created broad rights, they had the noble ideal of making citizenship meaningful. The public would be heard in consultations, get information under transparency laws and win redress for maladministration from a panoply of ombudsmen, tribunals, commissioners and judges. But these analogue systems assumed that few people would have the time or temperament to pursue their rights to the bitter end; and that of those who did, few would have the money to pay for a lawyer. AI is changing that, in effect making professional-standard petitioning quick and costless. Yet as each petitioner pursues their own interests, the state will buckle. Britain’s labour laws are becoming increasingly expansive—a problem in itself—but they will not be much help to aggrieved workers, because plaintiffs face a four-year wait for a tribunal hearing. An onerous planning regime is meant to produce handsome towns; paralysed by AI objections, nothing will get built at all. Britons under-claim the benefits to which they are legally entitled by as much as £20bn ($27bn), or 0.7% of GDP, a year; if everyone gets their dues, the public finances will wilt. The prospect is of a doom-loop of complaints and worsening services. More and more people may come to believe that the only way to get a result is to pull strings or cheat. Amid the inevitable anger and discontent, populism will thrive. So politicians need to grapple with agentic flooding now, before the tide rises further. One step is to stop creating entitlements that are ripe for AI-fuelled claims. Britain’s Employment Rights Act and Renters’ Rights Act open avenues of legal challenge for workers and tenants. Not only are they misguided, but ministers put little thought into how they would burden the courts. Another step is to prune the mass of procedural rights that have accreted over decades. To make the state less vulnerable requires tightening rules, closing loopholes and creating disincentives to AI-enabled excess. Byzantine, vague appeals systems should give way to simple, precise and limited ones. Money should be part of the solution. Britain could charge a fee for freedom-of-information requests, as other countries do. So could employment tribunals, which should also be more able to award costs against opportunistic claims. The new LevAIthan The most important task is to act faster and more radically on remaking the state with AI. That means not just speeding up the old cycle of applications, decisions and appeals, but replacing it altogether. The recast state would be flood-proof; it would also be more efficient and more responsive to citizens’ needs. Politicians promise to be radical, but their solutions are incremental. Rather than just handling locals’ objections, a new Ai-driven planning system could decide for itself whether a housing development meets a zoning code. Rather than processing benefits claims, it could devise personalised welfare interventions. Freedom-of-information requests could give way to transparency-on-demand. The state risks being swamped by agentic flooding. Even if the state’s rapid adoption of AI alarms some people, it is essential. For subscribers only: to see how we design each week’s cover, sign up to our weekly Cover Story newsletter.