Checklist · Competition & Consumer Law
AI-washing and AI-generated advertising claims: substantiation checklist
Pre-publication checklist for two risks: claims about a product's AI capabilities (AI-washing), and marketing content generated by AI (copy, images, reviews, prices), so every claim is true, not misleading and backed by evidence before release.
- Kind
- Checklist. Steps or checks to work through and tick off.
- Where it applies
- Australia, United States
- AI use
- Yellow AI can help in set ways. A lawyer checks specific points before use.
- Law stated as at
- 17 October 2026
- Status
- Maintained. Checked against the cited sources on 17 October 2026.
- Version
- 1
- Source
- Written for this library
When to use it
Use before launching a campaign, product page, investor or customer presentation that mentions AI, and before publishing any AI-generated marketing content. Do not use as a substitute for advice on financial product disclosure, therapeutic goods or other specially regulated advertising.
How AI may be used
Close supervision. AI can find and list claims across campaign material and match them to the evidence the client holds, but deciding what a claim conveys to the audience and whether the evidence substantiates it are lawyer judgments.
AI may
- Extract every express and implied claim from the copy, scripts, images and web pages into the claims register with locations.
- Match each claim to the evidence files the client has supplied and flag claims with no evidence.
- Suggest more accurate or qualified wording for claims the lawyer has decided to change.
AI must not
- Must not decide the dominant impression a claim conveys to the target audience.
- Must not generate testimonials, reviews, ratings, endorsements or performance statistics.
- Must not treat a vendor's marketing material as substantiation of the client's own claims.
The lawyer checks
- Each claim's overall impression has been assessed from the perspective of the ordinary member of the target audience.
- Evidence for each claim existed before publication and is filed.
- AI-generated images, voices or people do not misrepresent the product, its results or who endorses it.
- Disclaimers do not contradict the headline claim.
Method: how the Green, Yellow and Red levels are decided. This is guidance for planning, not legal advice.
Read the full text
The full text is for signed-in accounts. It is free. When you sign in you can:
- read the whole precedent, with its drafting notes beside it;
- copy it, or download it as a Word file or Markdown;
- add it to your firm’s knowledge base, so colleagues can find it;
- let the AI tools you connect read it from that knowledge base.
The summary, the law it rests on and the AI-use guidance above stay public. Privacy.
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