South Korea's competition regulator drafts advertising rules against AI washing, with comments due November 11

An electric heated mat sold as AI, a cat litter box and an "AI lawyer" are among 16 invented cases in a draft guideline the Korea Fair Trade Commission published Thursday to show when an artificial intelligence claim in an advertisement crosses the line. Comments are open until November 11.

The draft is not binding. It applies the four existing tests of Korea's advertising law, covering false or exaggerated, deceptive, unfairly comparative and disparaging claims, to products marketed as AI, and it adds an eight-item checklist for advertisers. Whether something counts as AI turns on whether it actually learns, infers or judges, the commission said, so a device that only follows preset rules, such as a sensor or a threshold switch, is hard to call AI. Advertisers must be able to prove their factual claims.

The label carries a price. In a Korea Consumer Agency survey from November 2025, 57.9 percent of respondents said they would pay more for a product using AI, about 21 percent more on average.