Ethan Mollick: agentic flooding of government services forces a worse-or-better choice
emollick · x · 2026-10-18
Ethan Mollick highlights research on 'agentic flooding': AI agents slash the friction of filings, complaints and appeals, with submission volumes surging across 12 government services in Australia, Germany, the UK, Brazil and the US since ChatGPT's release. Governments face two paths: suppress demand via fees, rate caps and narrowed eligibility (making services worse), or expand capacity by redesigning services and deploying agents for intake and routine processing (making them better). The paper warns friction-inducing fixes trade off equitable access and recommends mitigations that avoid this trade-off.
Related event: Ethan Mollick warns of agentic AI flooding public services(2 posts)→
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