Bharti Airtel and Google are working together on safer messaging in India. The two companies have teamed up to build what they call a safer messaging experience inside Android’s RCS messaging ecosystem.
This partnership comes at a timely period for phone users in India. With hundreds of millions of smartphone users online, spam and fraud campaigns have become harder to control. Many scams now move beyond calls and SMS into richer messaging platforms, where fake offers, phishing links, and impersonation attempts can hide inside legitimate-looking chats.
Airtel says it has spent the past 18 months fighting this problem. According to the company, its AI systems have blocked about 71 billion spam calls and 2.9 billion spam SMS messages, helping cut network-related financial fraud losses by nearly 69%. The new partnership extends that protection beyond traditional telecom messaging.
“At Airtel, we are obsessed with customer protection and continue to lead India’s fight against spam,” said Gopal Vittal, Airtel’s executive vice chairman. “We now call on the broader OTT communication platforms to work with us and make sure customers are protected from the spam and financial fraud menace.”
The technical approach blends telco-level verification with platform-level filtering. Messages sent through RCS will be checked in real time for sender identity, user consent preferences, and suspicious behaviour. Promotional messages can be classified separately from transactional ones, and accounts flagged by both Airtel and Google’s AI filters may face message throttling.
In the past, spam concerns even forced Google to pause some business promotions on RCS in India. The new carrier integration is meant to change that.
The approach is also not happening in isolation, as the Department of Telecommunications (India) introduced rules requiring stronger SIM-linked authentication for messaging services.
Ogbonda Chivumnovu
