If your phone is answered by an AI assistant, and that call is recorded, you are standing in two different areas of law at once. One is old and well mapped: who has to agree before a phone call may be recorded. The other is new and still moving: when you have to tell a caller that the voice is artificial. They are separate questions with separate answers, and a business that gets the first one right can still get the second one wrong.
This page sets out what each rule actually says, which states are the strict ones, where the law is genuinely unsettled, and what a small business should do about it. It is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for an attorney who knows your state. Statutes change; the date at the top of this page is the day it was last checked.
The federal floor: one party is enough
Federal law, under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, allows a call to be recorded when one party to the conversation consents. If you are on the call, you are that party. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, whose state-by-state recording guide is the reference most newsrooms and lawyers reach for, describes one-party consent as the minimum requirement across the country.
That is a floor, not a ceiling. States are free to demand more, and a dozen of them do.
The states that want everyone's consent
The Reporters Committee lists these states as requiring the consent of all parties before a phone call may be recorded:
- California
- Connecticut
- Delaware
- Florida
- Illinois
- Maryland
- Massachusetts
- Michigan
- Montana
- Nevada
- New Hampshire
- Pennsylvania
- Washington
Two of those come with a footnote worth knowing. Connecticut and Nevada are all-party for phone calls but one-party for conversations held in person. Michigan appears on the list for recordings made by someone who is not part of the conversation, and its treatment of participants has been read differently by different courts. Hawaii and Maine require all-party consent only in places where someone has a particular expectation of privacy.
You will find other counts elsewhere. Most commercial guides list eleven states rather than thirteen, usually by leaving out Connecticut and Michigan or by moving them to a "mixed" column. The disagreement is real, not sloppiness: the statutes in those states are ambiguous and the case law has pulled in more than one direction. If your business is in or calls into Connecticut, Michigan, Oregon or Vermont, that ambiguity is the reason to ask a lawyer rather than a blog.
The part most guides skip: whose law applies
A call from a one-party state to an all-party state is the ordinary case for any business with customers outside its own borders, and the law does not give a clean answer. Courts have disagreed. Some apply the law of the state where the recording equipment sits; others apply the law of the state where the person being recorded is. The practical consequence is that someone who objects can often choose the forum whose law suits them better.
The Reporters Committee's advice to journalists is the same advice that works for a business: assume the stricter state's law applies. For a company taking calls from anywhere in the country, that means behaving as though everyone's consent is required, every time. The cost of doing that is one sentence at the start of a call.
The second question: telling callers it is an AI
Recording consent says nothing about whether the voice is human. That is a separate and much newer body of rules.
At federal level, the Federal Communications Commission issued a Declaratory Ruling on 8 February 2024 holding that AI-generated voices count as "artificial" voices under the TCPA, the federal statute that governs automated calls. The ruling followed AI-cloned robocalls that imitated a sitting president's voice before the New Hampshire primary, and it was backed by a coalition of state attorneys general. Its practical effect is that a call placed to someone using a synthetic voice needs the same prior consent that any artificial or prerecorded voice call needs. The Commission specifically rejected the argument that an AI capable of live conversation should be treated as a live agent.
Read the scope carefully, because it is widely misreported. The ruling is about calls that are placed to people. A business answering its own inbound calls with an AI is in a different position from one dialing out with a cloned voice. That distinction is the single most important thing on this page for a service business.
At state level, the rules are a patchwork and growing:
- California's bot disclosure law has required a clear and conspicuous disclosure since 2019 where a bot is used to knowingly deceive someone about being human in order to sell something or influence a vote. A separate companion-chatbot law took effect in January 2026 and excludes customer service bots used only for transactions.
- Utah's AI Policy Act takes a reactive approach for most businesses: if a person asks whether they are dealing with an AI, you must say so. Proactive disclosure is required in regulated occupations.
- Maine has the rule that most clearly reaches a phone call, covering AI that communicates through aural as well as textual means, with a violation treated as an unfair trade practice.
- Colorado's AI Act requires disclosure to consumers but carves out cases where it would be obvious to a reasonable person.
- Idaho passed a Conversational AI Safety Act in March 2026 requiring clear disclosure where a user could reasonably believe the voice is human.
- Georgia has passed a chatbot disclosure requirement, and published sources disagree about whether it begins in July 2026 or July 2027.
There is no single federal statute that simply requires a business to tell a caller it is using AI. What exists is a growing set of state rules, a federal ruling aimed at outbound robocalls, and a general unfair-practices risk wherever a customer is misled.
What a small business should actually do
The two rules collapse into one sensible habit, because the strictest version of each is cheap to follow.
Say both things at the start of the call. That the caller is speaking with an AI assistant, and that the call is recorded. One sentence covers the all-party consent requirement in every state that has one, satisfies every state disclosure rule now on the books, and removes the argument that anyone was misled. A caller who objects can ask for a person or hang up before anything is recorded.
Decide recording separately from answering. Recording is useful and it is not mandatory. If your business is in a strict state, or you simply do not want recordings sitting around, answering with AI and not keeping audio is a legitimate configuration.
Know how long you keep it, and be able to say so. A retention period you can state in one sentence is worth more in a dispute than a privacy policy nobody reads.
Do not place outbound calls with a synthetic voice without talking to a lawyer first. This is the area the FCC has actually moved on, and it is where the penalties live.
How MairyAI handles it
MairyAI answers inbound calls and never places outbound ones, which keeps it outside the part of the FCC ruling that bites hardest.
Your Voice Agent states in the greeting of every call that the caller is speaking with an AI assistant and that the call is recorded. That disclosure is part of our terms and is not switchable, for the reason set out above: the strictest rule is cheap to follow and expensive to skip. A caller can ask for a person at any point, under rules you set.
Recording is your decision. Calls are recorded and transcribed by default and you can switch that off in your dashboard. Recordings and transcripts are kept for thirty days and then deleted, and call content is never used to train AI models. The full statement of what is recorded, what is disclosed and how long it is kept is on our recording and AI disclosure policy page, and the wider handling of call data is on the security page.
None of this is legal advice. It is how one product is built, and a description of rules that change. Check your own state, and ask an attorney before you rely on any of it.