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 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. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/08/06/how-ai-is-breaking-the-british-state
Gulf states should make a deal with Iran on Hormuz How to make Iranian blackmail less painful Aug 6th 2026 The gulf states are caught in a mess of Donald Trump’s making. After more than five months of war, the Strait of Hormuz is still mostly closed. A familiar pattern has emerged. When talks between America and Iran fail to yield progress, the two sides return to fighting; when bombs fail to break the deadlock, negotiations resume. In recent days Mr Trump has once again both talked up a deal on Hormuz and threatened to hit Iran “really hard”. He gave Iran “one last chance” to reopen the strait. Once again. Iran, however, still insists on near-total control of the waterway. Its exasperated neighbours seem to hold out little hope that it will soften its
stance—or be forced to do so. Even a new regime in Tehran, supposing one sprung up, may be unwilling to surrender its new prize. Instead, Gulf countries are racing to make the Strait of Hormuz obsolete. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are both building or expanding oil pipelines to bypass the strait; Iraq plans to divert its barrels north. American and Saudi investors are considering a giant refinery outside the strait. Such workarounds will help. But, as our “Hormuz dependency dashboard” shows, this quest for resilience unfortunately has its limits. Pipeline projects are often delayed. Yet even if all the plans were completed on time, by 2030, 5m of the 15m barrels a day (b/d) that crossed Hormuz before the war would still have to pass through it. Besides, pipelines can be struck by Iran. Relying on them risks exposing Gulf suppliers to other choke points, not least the Bab al-Mandab strait in the Red Sea where the Houthis, Yemen’s Iran-allied rebels, are firing at ships. Like Iran, they have charged ships fees before and may do so again (though they deny this). Don’t forget all the commodities besides crude oil. Without Hormuz, Qatar still cannot ship its liquefied natural gas—a fifth of the world’s supply. Gulf refineries remain largely cut off. And that is only on the export side, the part of the ledger that most concerns the outside world. From the point of view of the Gulf countries, many of their critical imports, from food to metals, cannot be sent cheaply overland. Pipelines are worth building, but Gulf countries should also spend more on defending them, and hasten work on other alternatives. All these fixes will take time. For now, the Gulf states need their ships to traverse Hormuz unharmed. America’s bombs have not been able to accomplish this. One drone strike is enough to deter most ships, and jack up insurance premiums. The only realistic way out is a deal, however unpalatable. Iran wants to manage the strait jointly with Oman, a more pragmatic government. Negotiating an agreement might give Gulf countries a chance to register their red lines and demands. Gulf countries might have no choice but to pay transit fees. Shipowners would probably tolerate them so long as they did not fall foul of sanctions. That means America needs to be on board.
Such a settlement would probably be fragile. International law says that maritime trade should be safe and free. A multilateral deal involving China, which has an interest in keeping the strait open and could restrain Iran, would be more durable. But that looks unlikely for now. Nor does Iran yet seem ready to accept a return to the status quo in the strait. Still, if a deal, however limited and unbalanced, lowers hostilities and buys Gulf countries time to build workarounds and defences that reduce Iran’s leverage, it will be worth having. Iran looks likely to win this battle. But it may yet lose the longer war. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/08/06/gulf-states-should-make-a-deal-with- iran-on-hormuz
Governments are making a dangerous bet on the AI boom To see why, look to the bond markets Aug 6th 2026 After a STEADY upward climb this year, 30-year bonds in America, France, Japan and Britain are all near their highest since the global financial crisis of 2007-09. That feat is particularly impressive for Britain, where the highs during a fiscal panic in 2022 have been long surpassed. For anyone who was wondering if yields would return to the lows of the 2010s as inflation fell after the pandemic, markets appear to have supplied a decisive answer: they will not. If anything, they are likely to climb higher still. The culprits are clear. Inflation has not quite been beaten, deterring central banks from cutting interest rates. Even Japan is leaving behind its loose- money policies (though not enough to strengthen the yen, which both Japan