As an innovative non-administrative penalty regulatory measure, comment letters can improve the quality of information disclosure and promote the healthy development of capital market. And studying the influencing factors of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is conducive to understanding the motivation of listed companies to participate in social governance. Based on this background, using a sample of Chinese listed companies from 2014 to 2022 and manually collecting comment letter data from the official websites of stock exchanges, we employ OLS regression analysis to investigate the impact of annual report comment letters on CSR. The results show a significant negative correlation between annual comment letters and CSR, indicating that receiving comment letters would damage the credit and reputation of listed companies, exacerbate agency conflicts, and make companies more inclined to reduce their social responsibility expenditure. Considering the supervision and governance effect of external attention, further analysis shows that higher analyst attention enhances the negative impact of comment letters on CSR. These conclusions provide empirical evidence and theoretical support for the specific impact of comment letters on firms, and offer valuable suggestions and new perspectives for giving full play to comment letters and improving CSR governance mechanism.