The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India notified the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference (Third Amendment) Regulations, 2026 on September 18, 2026, after a March 13 draft, stakeholder comments and an open house discussion on June 3. The notification is marked as to be published in the Gazette of India, and says most provisions come into force thirty days after that publication, four regulations after sixty days, and the amendments listed in an annexure after ninety days. The amendments add a regulation under which operators use AI and machine learning to identify sender numbers flagged as likely spam. Where five or more numbers of one sender are flagged within ten days, operators must act, starting with KYC re-verification and extending to barring outgoing services and, for repeated violations, disconnection. TRAI's explanatory text says AI-generated flags are not by themselves conclusive evidence for enforcement. TRAI says the 140xx, 1600xx and 1601xx number series must not be flagged as suspected spam for recipients, and prohibits call-management apps from blanket blocking or spam-tagging calls from those series, while individuals keep the freedom to block calls on their own devices. Automated application-to-person calls made without pre-declaration to the operator are treated as unsolicited commercial communication, and a terminating operator may charge the originating operator up to five paise per minute for such calls, subject to exemptions. The rules also add a fifteen-day consumer appeal, a six-hour suspension of misused headers or content templates, and one-year disconnection and blacklisting of telemarketers found responsible.