AI can rapidly expand the volume of work governments process, but human judgment does not scale at the same speed, creating a new bottleneck at the point of decision.

AI-generated writing has become ubiquitous since ChatGPT’s release in 2022, and institutions are struggling to keep up. Nowhere is the pressure more evident than in the courts. In the United States, the share of federal lawsuits filed without a lawyer rose from an 11 per cent average in 2005–22 to 16.8 per cent in 2025, with researchers linking the surge to the advent of AI. The same study found that the share of federal civil complaints containing machine-written text rose from 1 per cent in 2023 to 18 per cent today.

In July, the US Government Accountability Office warned that the Internal Revenue Service risks being swamped by AI-generated public comments on tax regulations. Because large language models can generate virtually unlimited variations on the same text, it noted, nearly identical comments are increasingly difficult to detect.

Research funders are being similarly inundated. Applications for grants across 12 funding organisations in the United Kingdom and Europe have risen by 57 per cent since 2022, fuelled by a surge in AI-assisted submissions.

In response to the flood of AI-generated writing, governments have begun automating their end of the process. An OECD survey of 58 national tax authorities found that 69 per cent were using AI in 2023, up from just 9 per cent in 2016. As AI’s capabilities have advanced, so have its uses, with tax authorities now relying on the technology to support........

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