Google uses Airtel’s AI-powered anti-spam measures to secure RCS in India

Details: John Tanner; Category: Cybersecurity; 02 March 2026; 4157 views

Indian telco Bharti Airtel announced on Sunday it is collaborating with Google to expand Airtel’s AI-powered spam filtering to Google’s Rich Communications Services (RCS) platform.

Under the partnership terms, the two companies will integrate Airtel’s telecom-grade safeguards into the RCS platform to provide RCS messages with extra levels of protection from mobile spam and digital fraud.

Airtel has spent the last year and a half deploying AI-powered anti-spam solutions into its network, which it has declared a success. To date, Airtel said its anti-spam initiatives have blocked 71 billion spam calls and 2.9 billion spam SMSes that has in turn resulted in a 68.7% decrease in the value of financial losses on its network.

However, its anti-spam measures only work for voice calls and SMS, which means there’s a significant security gap for non-telco communication platforms and standalone apps, which Airtel said have been increasingly been exploited by bad actors as voice and SMS channels become less viable channels for spam and fraud.

Fortifying Google’s RCS service with Airtel’s anti-spam measures will help brands that use RCS for enterprise communications enable their customers to easily distinguish legitimate business messages from spam and stay protected from potential risks that may emerge in other messaging platforms, said Airtel executive vice chairman Gopal Vittal in a statement.

“We have now partnered with Google to extend customer protection beyond the telco domain and made the rich messaging platform safer and more secure,” he said. “We now call on the broader OTT communication platforms to work with us and make sure that customers are protected from the spam and financial fraud menace.”

Sameer Samat, president of Android Ecosystem at Google, added that Google was “committed to continuing to work with the broader ecosystem of carriers to standardize messaging security and create a consistent and trusted messaging experience for all RCS messaging users around the world.”

Airtel has been in discussions with Google to launch RCS services since December 2025, but said it would only do so once sufficient anti-spam measures had been established. Rival telcos Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea already use Google to offer RCS services.