OFAC sanctions screening for DevOps

How DevOps teams can deploy and operate sanctions screening as reliable, observable infrastructure.

TL;DR

TL;DR: DevOps should run screening as infrastructure: deploy it like a service, monitor its health, and alert when the gate fails to check a payment.

Treat screening as infrastructure

Sanctions screening should be a dependable service, not a one-off script. sanctionsai.dev is a hosted API that screens a counterparty in one HTTP call under 100 ms, and it is also MIT-licensed and self-hostable for teams that need to run it in their own environment. Either way, it belongs in the payment pipeline with the same availability bar as the payment itself.

Monitor and alert

The gate must fail closed. Monitor the screening service's health and alert when checks start failing or timing out, because a silent outage means payments are either blocked or, worse, flowing unchecked. Track latency and error rates, and confirm the data feed stays synced hourly across 16 jurisdictions.

Operate the full protocol

The 4-Gate Agent Payment Protocol, SCREEN, SCORE, STOP, STAMP, maps to operational stages. Automate the STAMP logging so every payment carries a record of its screening result. Use risk_score for borderline cases and dispute_open to route false-positive disputes through review.