Can You Use AI to Write Your RIA’s Marketing Content?

Short answer: Yes, but the SEC Marketing Rule doesn’t care whether a human or an AI tool drafted your content — it cares whether the content is fair, balanced, and substantiated. If your firm is using ChatGPT, Claude, or any other AI tool to draft blog posts, social captions, or client-facing materials, that content is subject to the exact same review, approval, and recordkeeping requirements as anything written in-house. The tool changes. The compliance obligation doesn’t.

Here’s what firms need to know before they hand marketing content over to AI.

Where AI-generated content actually creates risk

AI tools are good at producing confident, well-structured writing quickly. That’s also exactly what makes them risky for regulated marketing content. A few specific failure points come up often:

  • Fabricated or unverifiable claims. AI models can generate specific-sounding statistics, performance figures, or client outcomes that aren’t accurate — and won’t flag that they made it up. Under the Marketing Rule, any claim needs to be substantiated. “I read it in a draft the AI wrote” isn’t substantiation.
  • Testimonials and endorsements done wrong. The Marketing Rule allows testimonials and endorsements under specific conditions — disclosure of compensation, conflicts, and status as a client or non-client. An AI tool asked to “write a client testimonial” has no way to know whether those conditions are actually met, and firms have gotten this wrong even without AI involved.
  • Cherry-picked or misleading performance references. If a prompt asks an AI tool to “make our returns sound strong,” it will — without the required context of time period, methodology, or comparison to a benchmark that the rule requires.
  • Confident but wrong regulatory framing. AI models will describe compliance requirements, registration status, or regulatory processes in ways that sound authoritative and are sometimes simply incorrect.

None of this means AI-assisted content is off the table. It means the same discipline that applies to any other draft has to apply here too — probably more of it, since AI-generated text can look more polished and “finished” than it actually is, which makes it easier to wave through review.

What the Marketing Rule actually requires, regardless of who — or what — writes it

A few obligations apply to any advertisement, AI-assisted or not:

  • It has to be fair and balanced. No cherry-picked results, no implied guarantees, no material omissions.
  • Any claim needs substantiation. If the content makes a factual claim, the firm needs to be able to back it up on request.
  • Testimonials and endorsements need proper disclosure. Compensation, material conflicts, and whether the person is a client all need to be addressed.
  • It needs to go through your firm’s actual review and approval process — not just a spell-check.
  • It needs to be retained as a books and records requirement. That includes drafts, not just the final published version, if your firm’s policy calls for it — which it should.

A practical policy for AI-assisted marketing content

Firms don’t need to ban AI tools to stay compliant. What they need is a documented process that treats AI-generated drafts the same way they’d treat a draft from any other source:

  • Human review before anything is published. No AI-generated marketing content should go live without a designated reviewer — ideally someone with compliance responsibility — reading it in full.
  • Fact-check every specific claim. Numbers, statistics, regulatory statements, and performance references need to be verified against a real source before they go out, not taken on faith because they sound plausible.
  • Keep the AI-generated draft and the reviewed final version. This supports your recordkeeping obligation and creates a clear record of what changed and why.
  • Train whoever’s using these tools on what the Marketing Rule actually requires, so they know what to flag before it reaches a reviewer — not after.

Where AI tools are genuinely useful, in our experience, is earlier in the process: structuring an outline, tightening prose, generating a first pass at a topic a marketing team already knows well. Where AI tools get firms into trouble is when specific, factual, or performance-related claims go from AI draft to published content without a compliance-trained set of eyes in between.