FCC Opens Comment on Bid to Let AI-Voiced Political Robocalls Reach Cellphones Without Consent
The agency hasn’t proposed anything. A conservative group has — and the clock runs out just two weeks before Election Day.
The Federal Communications Commission is not, at this point, proposing to loosen the rules on political robocalls. What it has done is open the door to hearing about it.
On Sept. 4, the FCC’s Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau issued a public notice seeking comment on a petition from Club for Growth, the conservative advocacy group. The petition, filed Aug. 31, asks the commission to waive its own rule and grant an exemption under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act so that callers could place noncommercial political calls to cellphones using an artificial or prerecorded voice, including an AI-generated one, without first getting the recipient’s consent.
That consent requirement is the core of current law. Robocalls to a cellphone are legal only if the person on the other end agreed to receive them.
Club for Growth wants an exception for political speech. According to its petition, the group and its affiliated political committees would use AI calling tools to inform and hear from potential voters more efficiently, including in multiple languages. The group also argues that comparable rules already govern landlines.
The petition would put some limits in place. As described by the National Consumer Law Center, callers could place no more than three calls to a number in a 30-day period and would have to stop within 10 days of being asked.
Consumer advocates say those limits mean little. Each campaign, PAC and nonprofit would get its own three calls. And a 10-day stop window, they argue, lets calls keep coming right up to the vote.
Patrick Crotty, an attorney with the NCLC, put it bluntly in an interview with Gray Television stations: the idea is “a strong contender for the gold” among bad ideas. He estimated political robocalls could rise as much as 40-fold over previous midterms, possibly reaching around 15 billion calls.
Club for Growth did not respond to Gray’s request for comment.
A reversal of a bipartisan line
The request runs against recent FCC history. In February 2024, after AI-cloned audio of President Joe Biden’s voice urged New Hampshire Democrats to skip their primary, the commission voted unanimously to treat AI voice-cloning as covered by the robocall ban. Democratic and Republican commissioners alike backed it.
The same Sept. 4 notice also seeks comment on a separate petition from Joe Shields. That one runs the other direction, asking the FCC to declare that peer-to-peer texting platforms, where a person clicks “send” to push out thousands of messages an hour, count as autodialers under the law.
The timeline
Initial comments were due Oct. 5. Reply comments are due Oct. 19. The notice sets no date for a decision.
Wisconsin votes Nov. 3. The state’s attorney general race is on that ballot, along with races for governor and Congress, all in a state where political spending runs heavy and phones ring often in the final weeks.
Wisconsin has already been part of the fight against illegal calls. In August 2025, Attorney General Josh Kaul joined a 51-attorney-general effort, Operation Robocall Roundup, which sent letters to dozens of voice providers routing suspect traffic.
The public can still weigh in. Reply comments go through the FCC’s Electronic Comment Filing System at fcc.gov/ecfs under CG Docket No. 02-278.
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