AI-written lawsuits overwhelm UK employment courts

UK employment tribunal claims rose 39% in the year through March 2026, with the case backlog up 55% to 64,000 unresolved claims. Many of the new filings are written with ChatGPT or Grok and sometimes cite fabricated case law, according to The Economist.

Why it matters: This is a concrete look at generative AI straining a public institution rather than just a workplace: cheap, plausible-sounding legal filings can clog a system built for a much lower volume of claims. It previews the same dynamic likely to hit other courts, regulators, and customer-service pipelines as AI-written submissions get easier to produce than to verify.