TRAI amends anti-spam rules: AI-flagged senders, robocall declarations, 7-day inquiry window and consumer appeals

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has amended the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations, 2018 through the Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference (Third Amendment) Regulations, 2026, to strengthen action against unsolicited commercial communications. A new Regulation 21A requires telecom operators to use AI/ML systems to identify numbers with a high probability of sending spam and share them among operators. Where five or more numbers linked to a sender are flagged within ten days, operators must act, including KYC re-verification, barring outgoing services and disconnection for repeated misuse.

Application-to-person calls, meaning automated, robo or pre-recorded calls, must be declared in advance to the operator. Undeclared calls will be treated as spam, and a termination charge of up to 0.05 a minute, levied by the terminating operator on the originating operator, applies. Businesses may message a customer based on the customer's own inquiry for only seven days, and only if the inquiry is written or digital and kept in verifiable form.

Consumers can now appeal the resolution of a spam complaint within 15 days. Action can be triggered by three complaints in ten days if the AI system has also flagged the sender, instead of five. Older consents count only if verifiable and registered on the operators' digital platforms, and misused headers or templates must be suspended within six hours.