By Josh Cruz, Founder & CTOThis is general information, not legal advice. Confirm your specific obligations with qualified counsel.
The short answer
Businesses use AI to send text messages to their customers every day, entirely within the law. What determines legality isn't the AI — it's whether your business is following the rules around consent, registration, and opt-out.
The short version: message only people who gave you explicit permission, register your sending number for A2P 10DLC, and honor opt-outs immediately. Do those three things, and AI texting is a lawful, effective way to stay in front of your leads and customers.
What the TCPA requires
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) is the primary federal law governing marketing calls and texts to consumers in the United States. It places restrictions on automated messaging to mobile numbers, and the FCC has the authority to enforce and interpret it.
For marketing texts, the TCPA generally requires that contacts have given you prior express written consent before you send them messages. "Express written consent" doesn't have to be a paper form — a checkbox on a web form, a text-in opt-in, or a signed agreement can qualify — but it does need to be clear and voluntary.
The TCPA applies to businesses sending the messages, not to the tools they use. Whether a human types the text or an AI generates it, the same consent requirements apply.
This is a plain-English summary of a complex law. Your specific situation may differ — confirm your obligations with qualified legal counsel before launching any messaging campaign.
What is A2P 10DLC?
A2P stands for Application-to-Person. 10DLC refers to the 10-digit long code phone numbers that most businesses use for texting (as opposed to short codes, which are the 5–6 digit numbers sometimes used for high-volume programs).
U.S. mobile carriers — AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and others — require businesses to register their brand and the campaigns they run before sending A2P messages through 10DLC numbers. Registration happens through The Campaign Registry (TCR), an industry body the carriers use to vet senders.
What registration involves:
- Brand registration: your company name, EIN, address, and type of business.
- Campaign registration: describing the use case (e.g., "marketing" or "lead nurturing"), the opt-in flow, and sample message content.
Registered campaigns generally enjoy better deliverability — messages are less likely to be filtered — and carriers can take action against unregistered senders. For any business sending marketing texts at scale, A2P 10DLC registration is effectively a requirement.
Opt-in and opt-out
Consent is the foundation of compliant texting. Before sending any marketing message, a contact must have actively agreed to receive texts from you — this is the opt-in. Purchased lists and scraped contacts do not qualify; the consent must be specific to your business and your type of messaging.
Every outbound marketing text should include a short opt-out instruction, such as "Reply STOP to unsubscribe." When a contact replies STOP (or a recognized variant), they must be opted out immediately, and you may not send them further marketing messages.
Honoring opt-outs promptly isn't just good practice — it's a legal requirement. A well-configured system handles this automatically, so no opt-out slips through.
Does using AI change the rules?
This is one of the most common questions we hear, and the answer is straightforward: the law regulates the act of sending messages to people, not the mechanism you use to generate or send them.
If a contact has given you proper consent, you can use AI to draft, personalize, and send messages to them — just as you could use a human team member. If a contact hasn't consented, AI doesn't change that — you still can't text them.
AI also doesn't modify your opt-out obligations. When someone replies STOP, that's a signal to your messaging system regardless of whether the original message came from a human or an AI. Your system needs to honor it either way.
The practical upside: a well-built AI messaging system can actually make compliance easier, because opt-out logic, consent checks, and registration can all be built in from the start — not bolted on as an afterthought.
How we keep it compliant
When we build an AI texting system for your business, compliance is built into the architecture:
- Opted-in contacts only. We work exclusively with your existing, opted-in leads and customers. We don't source lists, purchase contacts, or message anyone who hasn't given your business explicit permission.
- A2P 10DLC registration handled. We manage brand and campaign registration as part of the onboarding process, so your messages send through a properly registered pipeline from day one.
- Opt-out in every message. Every outbound message includes a clear opt-out instruction. Replies that match STOP or recognized variants are processed automatically — the contact is removed from future sends immediately.
This is why our messaging services, including speed-to-lead and lead generation systems, reference A2P 10DLC compliance explicitly. It's not a checkbox — it's how the system works.
This is general information, not legal advice. Regulations change, and your specific situation may have unique requirements. Always confirm your compliance posture with qualified legal counsel.