AI Washing is the New Greenwashing: An Analysis of Deceptive AI Communication in Indian Brands

The diffusion of artificial intelligence and brand communication has created strong incentives for firms to signal technological sophistication. AI washing is the practice of exaggerating, overstating, misinterpreting, and fabricating the role of artificial intelligence in communication about products, services, and business processes.  This paper argues that ‘AI washing’ has become the technological analogue of ‘greenwashing’, a deceptive tool driven by artificial intelligence rather than by the actual AI technology, in the context of Indian commerce. Greenwashing is the outright fabrication or deceptive marketing practice of presenting a product or service capitalising on consumer demand and misleading the public without accountability.  AI washing can be considered a subtle branding trick when an organisation or brand spends more time and money marketing their products. It is deliberately inculcating AI-driven data in the consumer mindset and fabricating reality to guide the consumer away from reality. This paper then examines the application of AI washing in the Indian commercial context through two cases: ‘the collapse of Builder.ai’ (the AI assistant Natasha was reliant on manual coding by Indian engineers) and ‘Fintech’. The paper supports the argument with the ‘Advertising Standards Council of India’ (ASCI) 2026 draft guidelines, the ‘Consumer Protection Act’, 2019 & ‘CCPA Greenwashing Guidelines’, and ‘India’s Information Technology’ Rules on AI-generated content provisions on synthetically generated information.  The paper analyses and concludes that greenwashing and AI washing share common structural communication about brand promotion, regulations, and the agenda for future empirical research.