What is the TCPA?

A plain-English guide for developers pointing an agent at a phone number.

The short version

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (47 U.S.C. § 227) is the U.S. law governing automated calls and texts. It was written in 1991 for autodialers and fax machines, and it applies to your AI voice agent exactly the same way.

It is enforced mainly through private lawsuits, and the damages are per call: $500 per violation, trebled to $1,500 if the violation was willful. There is no statutory cap. A loop that dials ten thousand wrong numbers is a five-million-dollar exposure before anyone argues about intent.

This is not legal advice. It is an orientation for engineers, and it is not a substitute for your own counsel.

What the law asks of you

Consent before you dial: You need the recipient's prior express consent to place an automated call or send an automated text. Marketing calls need prior express WRITTEN consent. An existing business relationship is narrower than most people assume — it is not a blanket permission.
Calling hours: 8am–9pm: No calls before 8:00 a.m. or after 9:00 p.m. in the LOCAL time of the person you are calling — not your local time, and not your server's. Several states impose stricter windows and Sunday restrictions.
Do-Not-Call registries: Telemarketing calls must be scrubbed against the National Do Not Call Registry, applicable state registries, and your own internal do-not-contact list. Internal lists must persist across campaigns and across time.
Reassigned numbers: Numbers get disconnected and handed to someone new. Your consent does not follow the number — it belonged to the previous subscriber. The FCC's Reassigned Numbers Database (RND) exists so you can check before dialing, and using it is how you qualify for the safe harbor.
Honor opt-outs: Any reasonable request to stop, in any channel, must be honored within ten business days. For SMS, STOP and its variants must work immediately and automatically.
Identify yourself: Automated calls must state who is calling and provide a way to be contacted. An AI voice agent does not change this, and in a growing number of states it must also disclose that it is artificial.

Why agents make this sharper

Nothing above is new. What is new is the speed. A misconfigured agent can place more calls in an hour than a human team places in a month, and every one of them carries the same per-call exposure. The failure mode is rarely malice — it is a retry loop, a stale list, or a timezone assumption nobody wrote down.

It also matters who is accountable. An agent is not a legal person. The consent, the scrubbing and the liability all belong to the organization operating it.

What Anima does, and what stays yours

Anima enforces some of this server-side, where your agent cannot route around it. It does not enforce all of it, and the difference is worth knowing precisely before you dial.

Control	Anima	Detail
TCPA consent attestation	Enforced	Outbound calling and SMS stay disabled until your org records a consent basis. Enforced server-side on every send; the agent cannot bypass it.
STOP / UNSUBSCRIBE honoring	Enforced	STOP, STOPALL, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END and QUIT are detected on inbound SMS and suppress the conversation automatically.
Per-tier call caps + rate limits	Enforced	Bounds the blast radius of a runaway agent. Not a compliance control, but it is what stops a retry loop becoming a class action.
Audit trail with correlation IDs	Enforced	Every call, text and consent change is recorded against the human who authorized it — the evidence you need if a claim is ever made.
Calling-hour (8am–9pm) enforcement	Yours	Anima does not check the destination's local time. If you dial at 6am, the call goes through. Enforcing the window is yours.
Reassigned Numbers Database scrubbing	Yours	Anima does not query the RND on your behalf. Scrub your lists yourself, and keep the results — the safe harbor is earned by the caller, not the platform.
Do-Not-Call registry scrubbing	Yours	Anima records that you attested to scrubbing. It does not perform the scrub, and cannot verify that you did.

If a control says Yours, assume Anima will happily place the call. Building that check is your job.

Practical checklist

Record where each consent came from, and when. Keep it as long as you keep the number.
Resolve the recipient's local time before dialing, and refuse outside 8am–9pm.
Scrub against federal DNC, state registries, your internal list, and the RND.
Wire opt-outs back into every channel — an opt-out from SMS must stop the calls too.
Have your agent identify itself, and disclose that it is an AI where required.
Keep the audit trail. If a claim is ever made, it is the only thing that helps.