On 18 March 2024 the SEC charged two investment advisers, Delphia and Global Predictions, over statements about their use of AI. Delphia had claimed it used AI and machine learning on client data to predict which companies and trends would succeed. Global Predictions had marketed itself as the first regulated AI financial advisor and said its platform gave expert AI-driven forecasts.
The Part That Travels
The penalties were $225,000 and $175,000. Gary Gensler, then SEC chair, put the principle in one sentence: advisers should not mislead the public by saying they are using an AI model when they are not.
It is easy to file that under securities enforcement and move on, and most accounting coverage did.
Look at what the cases actually turned on. Neither firm was penalised for a model that performed badly. Neither was penalised for using AI in a way that harmed anyone. They were penalised for the gap between a description and a capability.
That is not a securities concept. It is the ordinary rule that a factual claim in commercial speech has to be true and supportable, and it applies to anyone who writes marketing copy. Legal commentary now counts six AI washing matters brought since March 2024 across the SEC, DOJ and FTC, involving more than $44 million in alleged fraud, and in several of them the claims were accurate in outline but overstated in substance.
Overstated in substance is where most professional services marketing lives.
Read Your Own Website
So the useful exercise is not to follow the enforcement docket. It is to open your firm's site and read the AI sentences as if somebody intended to check them.
AI-powered tax research. Our AI reviews every return. Intelligent automation handles your bookkeeping. AI-driven insights for your business.
For each one, ask what would satisfy a sceptical reader. Which tool. On which engagements. Doing what, exactly, and reviewed by whom. If the honest answer is that a senior associate sometimes uses an assistant for first drafts, then the sentence claiming AI reviews every return is not a stretch. It is wrong, and it is wrong in a way that is trivially disprovable by any client who asks a follow-up question.
There is a second, quieter cost to that. A firm that oversells AI in its marketing then has to manage a client expectation it cannot meet, and the first difficult conversation is with the client who assumed the speed was automated and cannot understand why the bill reflects hours.
The Same Test Applies on the Other Side of the Desk
The reverse case is arriving too, and it is the one with fee income attached.
Clients now describe themselves as AI companies. Some of them are. For those that are not quite, the claim starts appearing in places with consequences: pitch decks, lender packs, grant applications, revenue recognition assumptions that depend on a product actually existing.
An accountant preparing or reviewing that material is not the guarantor of a client's marketing. But the professional instinct that applies to any other unsupported assertion applies here too, which is to ask what the claim rests on before it rides along in something with your firm's name on it.
What Substantiation Actually Looks Like
The good news is that this is a documentation problem rather than a philosophical one, and the artefacts are small.
Which tools are in use, on what kind of work, with what human review step, evidenced by something other than memory. A firm that keeps that record can describe its AI use precisely and defend every word. A firm that does not ends up writing marketing copy from an impression of what people in the office are probably doing.
MetaWurks covers one corner of that. Documents ingested into the platform are not used to train models and are not exposed to other users, role based access controls decide who can open which client's records, and audit logs record who opened what and when. Those logs are the unglamorous evidence that a stated practice is the actual practice.
It does not write your marketing, and it cannot make a claim true. What it removes is the situation where the only support for a sentence on your website is that it sounded right when somebody wrote it.
Six enforcement matters is not a wave. The principle behind them is not new and was never limited to registered advisers. If the site says AI does it, be able to show that AI does it.
Join the Conversation
Open your firm's website and find the sentences that mention AI. Could you evidence every one of them this afternoon?