On Wednesday, July 22, 2026, the House Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology will hold a legislative hearing titled “Protecting Communications Networks and Improving Connectivity” in 2123 Rayburn. Chairmen Brett Guthrie (KY-02) and Richard Hudson (NC-09) announced the hearing on July 15, framing it around three goals: protecting Americans from foreign threats like China, cracking down on illegal robocalls and scammers, and expanding broadband access.

Six bills are on the agenda, including H.R. 1027, QUIET Act, which has direct implications for how merchants communicate with customers.  H.R. 1027, the “Quashing Unwanted and Interruptive Electronic Telecommunications Act,” was introduced by Reps. Eric Sorensen (D-IL) and Juan Ciscomani (R-AZ) in February 2025 and referred to Energy & Commerce. It amends the TCPA in several material ways.

A new AI disclosure mandate

The bill adds a requirement that “if a person making a robocall uses artificial intelligence to emulate a human being, such person shall disclose at the beginning of the call or text message the fact that artificial intelligence is being used.” The disclosure obligation attaches to any “robocall,” a term the bill defines broadly to cover calls or texts made using automated dialing equipment to stored or randomly/sequentially generated numbers, or any call or text that uses “an artificial or prerecorded voice or an artificially generated message.” The only carve-out is for communications that “require substantial human intervention” to send.

The bill doubles both the civil forfeiture penalties and criminal fines under Section 227 and Section 503 when AI is used to impersonate a specific individual or entity with intent to defraud, cause harm, or wrongfully obtain something of value. This piece is narrower and more clearly targeted at scam calls — voice-cloning a family member or executive, for example.

Why the Disclosure Provision Is Worth Flagging

The trigger for disclosure is AI that “emulates a human being” — a phrase the bill doesn’t further define. Many merchants use AI-driven voice or chat agents to power branded customer service personas: a system that answers order-status questions, walks a customer through a return, or handles a support call in the brand’s voice. These systems are built to sound conversational and natural — arguably the essence of “emulating a human being” — even though there’s no intent to deceive and the customer initiated the contact for a legitimate commercial purpose. As drafted, the QUIET Act’s disclosure trigger doesn’t distinguish between a scam robocall spoofing a person’s voice and a retailer’s use of AI to send personalized marketing text messages; both could be swept into the same “disclose at the outset” obligation.

The “Stored Telephone Numbers” Prong Reaches Beyond Facebook v. Duguid

The QUIET Act defines “robocall” to include equipment that makes a call or sends a text to “(aa) stored telephone numbers; or (bb) telephone numbers produced using a random or sequential number generator.” That “or” is critical as it appears to be an attempt to engage in a legislative override of the Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in Facebook, Inc. v. Duguid at least with regard to this section of the TCPA.

The original TCPA defines an “automatic telephone dialing system” (ATDS) as equipment with the capacity “to store or produce telephone numbers to be called, using a random or sequential number generator.” For years, courts split on whether “using a random or sequential number generator” (RSNG) modified only “produce,” or both “store” and “produce.” A broad reading — modifying only “produce” — meant that any equipment dialing from a stored contact list automatically could qualify as an autodialer, sweeping in ordinary CRM-driven outbound calling and texting platforms. In Duguid, a unanimous Court rejected that reading: an ATDS must use an RSNG to either store or produce the numbers it calls. Equipment that simply dials down a stored, curated list of known customer numbers — the way virtually every merchant’s customer-service and notification platform works — fell outside the TCPA’s autodialer restrictions after Duguid. That holding is widely credited with pulling routine, consent-based business texting and calling out of a decade of autodialer class-action exposure.

The QUIET Act’s “robocall” definition restructures the same store-or-produce language into two separate, disjunctive clauses. Read literally, the provision requires no random or sequential generation at all: dialing or texting from a stored list of known, opted-in customer numbers would satisfy the “robocall” definition by itself, exactly the scenario Duguid held did not make equipment an autodialer. 

Undefined Terms Invite Litigation, Not Compliance

“Artificially generated message” and “emulate a human being” are two of the other most critical terms in the bill, and neither is defined. That is a problem specific to Section 227, because the TCPA carries a private right of action with statutory damages of $500–$1,500 per violation and no cap on aggregate exposure in a certified class — which is precisely why the TCPA has been one of the most heavily litigated federal consumer-protection statutes for over a decade, and why the ATDS definition alone generated a multi-year circuit split that only the Supreme Court could resolve.

Layering two new undefined terms onto that same statutory framework predictably produces the same pattern:

• “Artificially generated message” could mean a message that is fully AI-generated and AI-sent with no human involvement, or it could be read to cover any message where AI played a role in drafting content a human then sends — two very different compliance obligations with no textual basis to distinguish between them.
• “Emulate a human being” has no anchor in existing FCC rules or TCPA case law. It is unclear whether it requires an intent to deceive the recipient into believing they are speaking with a person, or whether any sufficiently natural-sounding text-to-speech or conversational AI system satisfies the standard regardless of intent or disclosure elsewhere in the interaction.

In practice, the FCC would need to undertake notice-and-comment rulemaking to give these terms operational content — a process that historically has taken years and now produces less certainty in the courts than it has in the era of Chevron deference. During that gap, the private right of action does not pause: plaintiffs’ firms can file suit the day the law takes effect, testing the outer boundaries of “emulate a human being” against any business using conversational AI, and using the threat of class certification and statutory damages to extract settlements regardless of the merits. Businesses are left with an unappealing choice between over-disclosing AI use in every customer interaction — degrading the customer experience and potentially triggering the same TCPA exposure through the “disclosure” call or text itself — or under-disclosing and betting on favorable judicial interpretation years down the line. 

The Bill Would Regulate RCS Under the TCPA for the First Time

The QUIET Act’s “text message” definition expressly includes “a rich communication service (commonly referred to as ‘RCS’) message” alongside SMS and MMS. That is a meaningful and, as far as the current record shows, unprecedented step: Congress has previously gone the other way on this exact question. In its RAY BAUM’S Act Congress excluded from the TCPA’s “text message” definition any message sent over an IP-enabled messaging service that is not SMS or MMS — a category that expressly includes RCS. RCS runs over a data (IP) connection rather than the traditional SMSC/carrier signaling architecture that SMS and MMS use.  Treatment of IP-based messaging services being outside the TCPA’s text-message framework is consistent with the Federal Communication Commission’s broader, long-standing reluctance to regulate IP-enabled and over-the-top communications services under the same common-carrier-style framework as traditional telephony.

The QUIET Act would abandon that distinction, at least for purposes of this new disclosure and penalty regime, without explaining why RCS should now be treated like SMS/MMS when the FCC has affirmatively held it should not be. That raises an important question:  if RCS is brought in, what principle distinguishes it from other IP-based, OTT messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp, and similar services) that would remain outside the bill’s reach? Absent a clear answer, this looks like an inconsistent expansion of TCPA-style liability to a category of IP communications Congress and the FCC have deliberately left outside that framework.

Where Things Stand

EIA has already met with House Energy & Commerce staff and is closely tracking the bill’s progress. With the hearing set for July 22, this is a good window to weigh in before the bill potentially advances toward markup. 

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The Ecommerce Innovation Alliance provides this update for general informational purposes. It is not legal advice. Businesses should consult qualified counsel about how these developments apply to their specific SMS and marketing practices.