I'm back from a week away, and the question waiting in my inbox is one I get every month: "Can I use one of those AI cold callers I keep seeing pitched?"
Here's the honest answer, and it's not the one the pitch decks give you.
The baseline hasn't moved: the FCC ruled that AI-generated voices count as artificial voices under the TCPA. Calling a cell phone with an AI voice generally requires prior express consent, marketing calls need the written kind, and damages run $500 to $1,500 per call. Per call. Class actions in this space settle in the millions.
What changed in 2026 made things murkier, not looser. The one-to-one consent rule everyone braced for got vacated in court. A major opt-out rule got delayed to 2027. Nothing got permitted; the aggressive rules just got paused, which means the boundaries now live in an older patchwork of rulings and state laws, some stricter than federal. Uncertainty is not a safe harbor.
And texting has its own police: carriers filter and block campaigns based on complaint rates no matter what a court said. Your SMS can be legally defensible and still get shut off because people reported it.
The safe lane is the same four habits it's always been: work consent you can prove, disclose the assistant, honor every no instantly on every channel it covers, and keep records of where consent came from. That lane also happens to be where the deals are: fewer, cleaner, disclosed touches on people who already engaged beat mass cold outreach on every number I track.
Standard reminder: this is education, not legal advice. Talk to a TCPA attorney before you build an outbound calling program. The full breakdown is on the blog: Is AI Cold Calling Legal in 2026?
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