The first sign, almost always, is a letter. Sometimes an email; sometimes, in the harsher jurisdictions, a frozen account. The wording is bureaucratic and slightly threatening. Your claim is “under review”. Your payments have been “suspended pending verification”. You are asked, with the weary politeness of a state that no longer feels it owes you an explanation, to provide bank statements going back five years, the names of every adult who has stayed in your home since 2019, and a justification of why last winter's gas bill was higher than your neighbour's.
You ring the helpline. The person on the other end is courteous and entirely unable to tell you why. They have a screen in front of them. The screen has flagged you. They cannot say what flagged you, because they do not know, and because, even if they did, the contract their employer signed forbids them from saying. There is no name on the decision. There is no signature on the letter. There is no address, beyond a generic post-office box, to which an appeal might be sent.
That experience, recounted in thousands of variations across Europe, North America and Australasia over the past five years, is the moment at which the abstract debate about “AI in the public sector” stops being abstract. A computer has decided you are likely to be a fraud. The state has acted on that decision. You are now poorer, frightened, and obliged to prove a negative to a body that will not say what it suspects.
