AI in action · Regulation
SEC's Atkins: Better Data Need Not Mean More Disclosure
SEC Chairman Paul Atkins closed the November 9 roundtable on AI and machine-readable data by saying better data "need not mean more disclosure".
The Securities and Exchange Commission's roundtable on machine-understandable data "in the age of super intelligence" took place on Monday, November 9, at the agency's headquarters in Washington, three weeks after it was announced. Commissioner Mark Uyeda opened the day and Chairman Paul Atkins closed it, with remarks the SEC published the same day. The panels mixed technology and data providers, investors, operating companies, practitioners and academics.
Atkins began with a change in who reads company filings. "Financial disclosures designed primarily for people to read are increasingly processed and analyzed by machines," he said. He gave two figures from staff of the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis: the Commission publishes 15 data sets free of charge, and use of one of them, the Financial Statement Data Set, "has multiplied more than fivefold" over the past two years.
The sentence that matters most to listed companies was a limit on what the agency intends to ask of them: "better data need not mean more disclosure." In his account, the larger opportunity is to make what issuers already report easier to access and use, without new burdens. He paired that with a warning in the other direction. The tools do not remove an issuer's duty to produce, verify and defend its disclosures, he said, and the same technologies "can also magnify errors and missing context".
That warning is concrete for anyone who uses AI to read markets. Screeners, earnings summaries and research agents that parse filings at scale take tagged figures as given; a mislabelled number that an analyst might catch on a careful read can pass straight into thousands of automated outputs. Atkins described high-quality data as the "propellant" for these systems and said poor data "can undermine even the most sophisticated analytical tools".
No proposal came out of the day. Atkins asked market participants to keep engaging with the Commission as it considers its approach to data and super intelligence, and a recording of the panels is due on SEC.gov. Any concrete step, such as new data sets or changes to how filings are tagged, would have to come later as a proposal open to public comment, which is the point at which this roundtable becomes a rule or remains a conversation.
Sources: SEC — Chairman Paul S. Atkins, Closing Remarks at Roundtable on Machine-Understandable Data in the Age of Super Intelligence (Nov 9, 2026); SEC — Press release 2026-106, SEC Announces Roundtable on Machine-Understandable Data in the Age of Super Intelligence (Oct 19, 2026)