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SeedPublished 2026-10-23

AI washing and stock price crash risk

Artificial intelligence and stock price crash risk are both rising in the finance journals, and "AI washing" has appeared as a keyword. When the AI story in disclosures runs ahead of actual AI investment, does the stock carry more crash risk?

financeaccountingai

What prompted this#

In the finance journals, "artificial intelligence" had 31 papers in July–September 2026 against about 17 expected from its earlier share, and "stock price crash risk" had 27 against 17 (see the finance dashboard). Since October 2025, 119 papers carry a crash-risk keyword, and 10 of them also carry an AI keyword. The keyword "AI washing" appears on 11 papers (8 in finance journals, 3 in management).

Questions#

  • Can an AI-washing score be built from AI talk in filings and calls relative to measurable AI inputs, such as AI job postings, AI patents and computing spending?
  • Is a high score followed by more crash risk (negative return skewness, down-to-up volatility), as theories of hoarded bad news predict?
  • Did the first regulatory actions against AI washing change how firms talk about AI?

Data that could help#

  • Filing and call text (the corporate filings category of the dataset ranking), online job postings, patents and daily returns.
  • Crash-risk measures from firm-specific weekly returns.

Next step#

Count AI mentions in a sample of 10-K filings from 2020 to 2025 and compare them, firm by firm, with AI job postings.

The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26
KeywordPapers, last 30 daysRankPapers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26*Papers, last 36 months
AI washing1#288111
stock price crash risk6#306291
artificial intelligence37#61,280

Markdown version of this note: /ideas/ai-washing-and-crash-risk.md

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Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). AI washing and stock price crash risk. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 23, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/ai-washing-and-crash-risk

@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-ai-washing-and-crash-risk,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {AI washing and stock price crash risk},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/ai-washing-and-crash-risk}},
  urldate = {2026-10-23},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}

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