OFAC Ai FAQs
Answers to common questions about OFAC sanctions and AI agents that make autonomous payments.
TL;DR
TL;DR: AI agents can violate OFAC sanctions when they pay a designated counterparty, and the operator carries strict liability. Pre-payment screening stops the agent before the violation.
Where AI agents fit
AI agents increasingly move money through tool calls and integrations. An agent that pays a wallet on the SDN List creates a violation for its operator, because OFAC applies strict liability without an intent requirement. SanctionsAI, also called agentmail, is a screening API built for exactly this: it checks a counterparty before the agent pays and returns ALLOW or BLOCK in under 100 ms.
Common questions
- Which agent frameworks are supported? Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, LangChain, CrewAI, Eliza, and the OpenAI Agents SDK.
- Do agent rails screen on their own? No, AP2, ACP, and Coinbase AgentKit move money but do not screen.
- How is it installed? The MCP server installs with pip install sanctions-mcp.