OFAC Screening Availability

The uptime and reliability of a screening service, where an outage blocks every transaction.

TL;DR

TL;DR: Screening availability measures how reliably a screening service responds, and for payment screening, an outage means transactions cannot proceed.

Why availability is a hard requirement

Payment screening sits in the critical path of every transaction. If the screening service is down, the compliant choice is to stop payments entirely, which means availability directly equals business availability. A screening outage is not a degradation; it is a full halt, so the service must be designed for high uptime and fast, predictable responses. Teams typically measure availability in nines and set an error budget, because a failed screen is a failed payment.

Latency and freshness

Two properties define a usable screening service. Latency: the check must return fast enough to gate payments without slowing them, and sanctionsai.dev returns a result in under 100 ms. Freshness: the underlying list must be current, and sanctionsai.dev syncs hourly against the US Treasury sdn.csv. A service that is fast but stale, or fresh but slow, fails one side of the requirement.

Availability for self-hosters

Because sanctionsai.dev is MIT licensed and self-hostable, a team that needs control over availability can run the screening service on its own infrastructure. That removes a third party dependency from the payment path while keeping the same ALLOW or BLOCK result an agent depends on. High availability also requires a fallback, such as a self hosted instance, when the primary service is unreachable. The free tier supports 5 checks per day for evaluation.