Talk, Walk, and Market Response: Multimodal Measurement of AI Washing and Its Capital Market Consequences in China

Corporate AI-washing-the strategic misrepresentation of AI capabilities via exaggerated or fabricated cross-channel disclosures-has emerged as a systemic threat to capital market information integrity with the widespread adoption of generative AI. Existing detection methods rely on single-modal text frequency analysis, suffering from vulnerability to adversarial reformulation and cross-channel obfuscation. This paper presents AWASH, a multimodal framework that redefines AI-washing detection as cross-modal claim-evidence reasoning (instead of surface-level similarity measurement), built on AW-Bench-the first large-scale trimodal benchmark for this task, including 88412 aligned annual report text, disclosure image, and earnings call video triplets from 4892 A-share listed firms during 2019Q1-2025Q2. We propose the Cross-Modal Inconsistency Detection (CMID) network, integrating a tri-modal encoder, a structured natural language inference module for claim-evidence entailment reasoning, and an operational grounding layer that cross-validates AI claims against verifiable physical evidence (patent filing trajectories, AI-specific talent recruitment, compute infrastructure proxies). Evaluated against six competitive baselines, CMID achieves an F1 score of 0.882 and an AUC-ROC of 0.921, outperforming the strongest text-only baseline by 17.4 percentage points and the latest multimodal competitor by 11.3 percentage points. A pre-registered user study with 14 regulatory analysts verifies that CMID-generated evidence reports cut case review time by 43% while increasing true positive detection rates by 28%. These findings confirm the technical superiority and practical applicability of structured multimodal reasoning for large-scale corporate disclosure surveillance.

At a time when the phenomenon of 'AI washing' is quietly spreading, an increasing number of enterprises are using the label of artificial intelligence merely as a cosmetic embellishment in their annual reports, rather than as a genuine engine driving transformation. A test regarding the essence of innovation and the authenticity of information disclosure has arrived. This paper employs large language models to conduct semantic analysis on the text of annual reports from Chinese A-share listed companies from 2006 to 2024, systematically examining the impact of corporate AI washing behaviour on their green innovation. The research reveals that corporate AI washing exerts a significant crowding-out effect on green innovation, with this negative relationship transmitted through dual channels in both product and capital markets. Furthermore, this crowding-out effect exhibits heterogeneity across firms and industries, with private enterprises, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and firms in highly competitive sectors suffering more severe negative impacts from AI washing. Simulation results indicate that a combination of policy tools can effectively improve market equilibrium. Based on this, this paper proposes that the government should design targeted support tools to 'enhance market returns and alleviate financing constraints', adopt a differentiated regulatory strategy, and establish a disclosure mechanism combining 'professional identification and reputational sanctions' to curb such peer AI washing behaviour.

We introduce Deep FinResearch Bench, a practical and comprehensive evaluation framework for deep research (DR) agents in financial investment research. The benchmark assesses three dimensions of report quality: qualitative rigor, quantitative forecasting and valuation accuracy, and claim credibility and verifiability. Particularly, we define corresponding qualitative and quantitative evaluation metrics and implement an automated scoring procedure to enable scalable assessment. Applying the benchmark to financial reports from frontier DR agents and comparing them with reports authored by financial professionals, we find that AI-generated reports still fall short across these dimensions. These findings underscore the need for domain-specialized DR agents tailored to finance, and we hope the work establishes a foundation for standardized benchmarking of DR agents in financial research.