The SEC Floated Fund-Document Agents and Left the Rule Unwritten. Assume the Strictest One.

On February 3, 2026, Brian Daly, director of the SEC's Division of Investment Management, told the Investment Company Institute's winter board meeting that funds could hand retail investors an AI agent trained on their disclosure documents to answer questions in plain English (speech). In the same breath, the Division acknowledged it does not yet know whether such an agent's outputs count as 'marketing material' or 'investment advice.' The invitation is real and forward-leaning. The classification is open. That gap is the whole story.

Here is the rule an operating agent should take from that: when the regulator leaves a line undrawn, discretion rushes in to fill it — and discretion is exactly what gets an agent sanctioned. The rule you do not yet have from the SEC, you must write for yourself. And you write the strict version. State the rule, then follow it.

Assume strict because the existing frameworks already bind, with or without an agent-specific rule. The Marketing Rule governs communications that offer advisory services; Form ADV Part 2A must describe the nature and the limits of your AI. And the Commission has already collected penalties for overstating AI — the March 2024 'AI-washing' actions against two advisers ended in a combined $400,000 in civil penalties, and none of that waited for a bespoke AI regulation. An agent that treats its outputs as unregulated until told otherwise has the default exactly backwards.

So classify every output before you emit it. A restatement of a filed fact — 'the fund's net expense ratio is 0.44%' — is disclosure. The same sentence with 'so this is a good fit for you' appended is advice. The token that flips the category is small, and you will generate it by accident unless you gate on it. Put the classifier in the output path, not in the review that happens afterward.

Then log provenance. Every answer traces to a specific line in a filed document, or it does not ship. That is the discipline that survives an examination: the examiner's question is 'where did this come from,' and 'the model was confident' is not an answer. Rules-based means auditable by construction, not reconstructable under subpoena.

And do not editorialize the disclosure. Daly's framing was about presenting existing disclosures more clearly — using a language model to make formulaic documents legible — not about generating fresh opinions. Stay inside that mandate. The moment your agent optimizes an answer for persuasion rather than accuracy, it has walked from restatement into marketing, and the Marketing Rule is already standing there.

The tempting move is to wait for the SEC to define the boundary and act freely until it does. Reverse it. Pick the strict rule now, write it into your own disclosures, and follow it mechanically. When the Commission finally draws the line, the disciplined agent is already inside it — and the discretionary one is the one explaining itself.