Some evidence of the slopocalypse in government
Sam Freedman has some links in his recent article “Drowning in slop” relevant to my recent posts about how AI agents will overwhelm trust-based institutions, including requests, inquiries, complaints, and other kinds of submissions to various government agencies.
The first link is to this July 2026 preprint from Google about how Americans use Gemini, which showed that a little over 1% of non-work conversational AI queries were about using government services (see Figure 14B). By contrast, the share of non-work active time dedicated to using government services is barely distinguishable from zero, or as the paper puts it:
The biggest relative outlier is “Government Services & Civic Obligations”, which has almost a twenty-fold higher representation in AI usage than human activities.
A similar study of conversations with Claude found 1.07% related to “government navigation, immigration and visa guidance, and tax advice and compliance”, which is very close to the Google figure.
The second link is to this August 2026 preprint entitled “Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services”. It documents rising numbers of submissions to various government since the introduction of ChatGPT, across domains including air passenger rights claims, ombudsman complaints, administrative court litigation, and freedom of information requests. While the authors could not directly establish the proportions of the increases attributable to AI, the reported pattern is certainly consistent with my fear of people copy and pasting slop into government submission forms (and increasingly, agents submitting slop themselves directly).
Interestingly, federal Access to Information requests in Canada have been declining rather than increasing. The number of requests received over the past three reported fiscal years (excluding requests to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada):
- 2022–23: 52,377
- 2023–24: 46,857
- 2024–25: 33,928
But the sharp decline in 2024–25 is misleading. Nearly 90% of the decrease came from the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), which saw its Access to Information requests fall from 13,277 to just 1,765. The agency attributes this decline to a change in its online request system, which now directs people seeking their own records to make requests under the Privacy Act instead.
Indeed, across the federal government (again excluding immigration), the combined number of Access to Information and Privacy Act requests increased by 7.8% in 2024–25. So there hasn’t been a collapse in demand for government records, but neither has there been a tsunami. But these figures only cover up to the period ending March 2025, before the current wave of agentic AI, so it remains to be seen how these advances will show up in the numbers.