Can you be sued for an AI text message?
Under the TCPA, your customer can sue you directly— no regulator required, damages set per message. That is what makes it sharper than Canada’s CASL, and it is why this page names mechanisms instead of promising compliance.
Written by the person who built it, not a marketing team. It is not legal advice — if your situation is unusual, ask a lawyer. If you’re in Canada, CASL and PIPEDA are here.
What the software enforces, and how
“TCPA compliant” is a claim anyone can print on a pricing page. These name the mechanism, so you can judge whether it would actually hold.
STOP is honoured inside the send function, so no feature can skip it
The suppression check lives in sendSMS itself rather than at the call sites. A new automation, a new reply path, anything at all that sends a text inherits it — there is no route to the carrier that goes around it. This is the mechanical half of what a TCPA claim usually turns on: whether the request to stop was actually honoured, and how fast.
The keyword list is the carrier-standard one, not a guess
STOP, STOPALL, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END and QUIT, matched case-insensitively on the whole message. YES is deliberately NOT treated as a resume keyword — it is the most common reply to any question a business asks, and treating it as consent to resume would silently re-subscribe people who never asked to.
Every business-initiated text carries an opt-out instruction
Appended automatically unless the message already contains one, so it is present whether the wording came from the AI, from an automation you wrote, or from you. A recipient who cannot find how to stop is a recipient who complains to the carrier instead.
One trigger can never buzz a customer more than 3 times
Two caps, because one was not enough. Each automation may send at most 2 texts per run — but three automations on the same trigger could legally send 2+2+2 in one moment, so the runtime also caps the EVENT at 3 however many automations fire. Volume is what turns an annoyed recipient into a plaintiff.
Business-initiated texts only go out between 8am and 9pm where your customer is
The recipient's time zone is derived from their area code and checked inside the send function, alongside the opt-out check — so a follow-up scheduled for 2am is held rather than sent. A number we cannot place falls back to a window that is inside 8am-9pm in every North American zone at once, which means a gap in that map delays a message and can never cause a violation. A reply to someone who just called you is exempt and still goes immediately: that is an answer to contact they started, not a solicitation.
Someone who opts out stays opted out, even if the business closes its account
Enforced by the database, not by policy. Deleting an account used to erase its opt-out records by cascade; the foreign key detaches them instead, so one party's erasure cannot undo another party's withdrawal of consent. A revived number that starts texting a previously opted-out consumer is a textbook claim.
The AI will not quote a price or promise a time
Hard rules in the reply engine, tested against adversarial messages 30 times per rule on every audit run — because a rule that holds 29 times out of 30 is not a rule. It also never claims to be a person.
What is still yours
The TCPA follows the caller, and the caller is you. A vendor claiming to absorb that is telling you something false — software can make compliance the default, which is what the section above describes, but it cannot take on your obligation.
- Having the consent the law requires before a message goes out. Prior express written consent is the standard for marketing; an existing customer who gave you their number for a job is a different position from a list you bought. Under the TCPA the caller is you — the software is a tool, not the sender.
- Checking that a number has not been reassigned to someone else. The FCC runs a Reassigned Numbers Database for exactly this, and a text to the new holder of an old customer's number is a claim regardless of how good your original consent was.
- Anything you write yourself, as opposed to what the AI drafts under its rules.
- State law on top of the federal rule. Florida and Oklahoma in particular impose stricter consent and hours requirements than the TCPA alone, and they are enforced by the same private right of action.
Common questions
- Can my business be sued for an AI text message?
- Yes, and by the recipient directly — that is what makes the TCPA different from most marketing rules. It carries a private right of action with statutory damages per message, which means a claim does not depend on a regulator deciding to act or on the recipient proving financial loss. The statute looks at who the message was sent on behalf of, so the business is the caller and the software is a tool. No vendor can take that on for you, and one telling you otherwise is selling something.
- Does Quietworkk stop texts going out at 2am?
- Yes, for anything the business starts. The recipient's time zone is derived from their area code and checked inside the send function itself, so a follow-up or review request scheduled for 2am is held rather than sent, and no automation can route around it. A number that cannot be placed falls back to a window that sits inside 8am to 9pm in every North American time zone simultaneously — so an incomplete area-code map delays a message and cannot cause a violation. The exception is a reply to somebody who just contacted you: a missed call at 11pm still gets its text back immediately, because that is an answer to contact they started rather than a solicitation.
- What happens when someone replies STOP?
- They are suppressed immediately and unconditionally. The check runs inside the send function itself rather than at each place that sends, so no feature — existing or future — can forget it, and no setting can override it. The keywords are the carrier-standard set: STOP, STOPALL, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END and QUIT. Replying YES does not resume messages, because YES is the single most common answer to any question a business asks and treating it as consent would re-subscribe people silently.
- Is missed-call text-back available in the United States yet?
- No. Texting from a business's own number in the US requires A2P 10DLC registration with the carriers, through The Campaign Registry, and that registration requires a registered legal entity. Quietworkk's Complete tier is blocked on it and is not self-serve for that reason. Every page on this site that mentions the phone tier says so rather than taking the order and sorting it out later.
- Does an existing customer count as consent under the TCPA?
- It depends on what the message is. An existing business relationship supports different treatment for informational messages — replying to an enquiry the customer initiated, confirming an appointment they booked — than it does for marketing, where prior express written consent is the standard. The practical line is whether the person asked to hear from you about this. Someone who filled in your contact form asked; someone on a purchased list did not. This is general information rather than legal advice, and the distinction is worth twenty minutes with a lawyer before you start any campaign.
The registration that gates US texting is explained on the A2P 10DLC page. What we hold and who processes it is in the Privacy Policy, and the consent obligation is stated in the Terms rather than buried.
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