SanctionsAI vs World-Check
World-Check is LSEG's screening database for sanctions, politically exposed person (PEP), adverse media, and enforcement risk. SanctionsAI is a self-serve OFAC screening API built for the agent payment path. This page compares the two only on documented facts, each traced to its operator's own pages, and says plainly where they are not comparable. Reviewed 10 October 2026.
TL;DR
TL;DR: World-Check is an enterprise screening database owned by LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group), consumed through LSEG screening solutions by compliance teams at regulated institutions. SanctionsAI is a narrow OFAC screening API with a published free tier, built so an AI agent can check a wallet or a name mid-payment with a plain HTTP call. One is a data-and-workflow platform sold through sales conversations; the other is a metered API you can call from curl without an account. They overlap on sanctions data and differ on almost everything else, so most teams that need both buy both for different layers.
What World-Check is, per its operator
LSEG's Risk Intelligence page introduces the product by name: “You might know us for our World-Check screening database, but what you might not know is that we offer so much more.” The same page describes the dataset's scope: “intelligence data used across LSEG screening solutions to help organisations identify potential sanctions, politically exposed person (PEP), adverse media, enforcement and other risk indicators.” LSEG positions World-Check data inside its screening solutions for “KYC, sanctions screening, adverse media reviews, third-party assessments and payment verification workflows.” It also documents LSEG World-Check Verify, “a cloud-native API that uses World-Check data” for digital onboarding and payment journeys. All four quotations are from the LSEG Risk Intelligence page as reviewed on 10 October 2026.
The ownership lineage is public record. Thomson Reuters announced its acquisition of World-Check on 16 May 2011 in a press release still hosted on world-check.com. World-Check then formed part of the Thomson Reuters Risk Management Solutions suite before being transferred to Refinitiv after a merger deal with The Blackstone Group announced in October 2018, per the World-Check Wikipedia article with citations. LSEG acquired Refinitiv in 2021, which is why LSEG's own page speaks of World-Check in the first person today. If you meet the product under the names Refinitiv World-Check or the older World-Check One interface family, it is the same product lineage under the current owner's branding.
What SanctionsAI is, per its own documentation
SanctionsAI screens against the official US Treasury OFAC SDN list, synced hourly, per this site's homepage. Its published scope at review time: 19,218 SDN name entries, 16 embargoed jurisdictions, and a downloadable dataset of 947 OFAC-sanctioned crypto wallet addresses refreshed to the OFAC SDN publication of 2 October 2026. Delivery is a REST API returning JSON, an MCP server for agent frameworks, and a CLI. The free tier allows 5 checks per day per IP with no signup and no API key; paid plans start at $19/month; the platform is MIT licensed and self-hostable. Latency is documented as under 100 ms on the site's homepage. Every number in this paragraph is traceable to a page on this site, listed in the sources manifest linked below.
Side-by-side comparison
| Dimension | SanctionsAI | World-Check (LSEG) |
|---|---|---|
| Owner | Independent (Sipiteno); MIT-licensed code | LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group), via the 2011 Thomson Reuters acquisition and the 2021 Refinitiv acquisition |
| Scope | OFAC only: SDN names, crypto wallet addresses, embargoed jurisdictions | Sanctions, PEP, adverse media, enforcement and other risk indicators, per LSEG's own scope description |
| Update cadence | Hourly sync from the official US Treasury SDN list; crypto dataset refreshed to the 2026-10-02 OFAC publication at review time | Not documented on the public LSEG page reviewed; cadence terms live in customer contracts |
| Delivery | REST JSON API, MCP server, CLI; works from a plain curl without an account | LSEG screening solutions; World-Check Verify, a cloud-native API for onboarding and payment journeys, per LSEG's page |
| Pricing | Published: free, 5 checks/day, no key; from $19/month in production | No public price list on the official page reviewed; enterprise, quote-based access through LSEG sales |
| Self-hosting | Yes — MIT licensed, self-hostable | No; the database is licensed, not shipped |
| External audit evidence | Not published | Not reviewed on the public page; ask LSEG for current audit attestations during procurement |
Where each one fits
Choose World-Check when the requirement is screening breadth inside an enterprise compliance program. PEP coverage, adverse media, enforcement data, and integration with LSEG's screening solutions are the documented product. A regulated institution's compliance program may be expected to demonstrate exactly those capabilities to a supervisor or a bank partner, and procurement will want the vendor's audit and data-governance documentation, which is negotiated through sales rather than published on a pricing page. That is the documented product, and it is a real product. SanctionsAI does not screen PEPs, does not screen adverse media, and does not replace a consolidated enterprise risk database.
Choose SanctionsAI when the decision point is an agent about to move money. The question at that moment is narrow: is this counterparty, this name, or this wallet on the OFAC lists, answered before the transaction signs. That check needs to be callable from the agent's own runtime — an HTTP call, an MCP tool, or a CLI — without a sales cycle, and it needs a published answer at zero cost while you wire it up. It also needs wallet-address coverage, which the OFAC crypto designations provide and which the 947-address dataset makes inspectable before you write any code. If your compliance program already runs World-Check for onboarding, the two compose: enterprise screening where breadth matters, a real-time OFAC gate in the payment path where seconds matter.
A note on naming, because search results conflate it
Queries about this product arrive as “World-Check”, “Refinitiv World-Check”, “World-Check One”, and “LSEG World-Check”. All of them land on the same lineage: World-Check database, transferred Thomson Reuters → Refinitiv → LSEG. LSEG's current page front-lines the World-Check database inside LSEG Risk Intelligence and documents World-Check Verify as the cloud-native API. If a vendor document still says “Refinitiv”, the product is the same one LSEG owns today: LSEG agreed to buy Refinitiv in 2019 and completed the acquisition on 29 April 2021, and has been retiring the Refinitiv name across the group since 2023.
Correction note (10 October 2026)
This page was a short template before this rebuild. In the version published from July 2026 to 9 October 2026, claims appeared here that did not meet this site's evidence bar, and they have been removed: that World-Check costs “$50,000 to $250,000 per year” and that industry estimates support that range; that there is “no free tier, no developer sandbox” stated as current vendor fact rather than as an observation about access model; that World-Check provides “over 4 million profiles across 240 countries” (that figure describes Dow Jones Risk & Compliance's consolidated profile database, a competing product — the two were conflated); and that SanctionsAI integration takes “under 5 minutes”. LSEG publishes no public price list and no public profile count for World-Check on the page reviewed, so this page now states exactly that, and nothing more. A separate page documents what is and is not knowable about Refinitiv World-Check pricing.
World-Check alternatives
If the decision is "which tool instead of (or alongside) World-Check", the honest shortlist by use case, from each vendor's own published positioning as reviewed on 10 October 2026:
- AI agents and payment-path screening — SanctionsAI: keyless OFAC screening API, 5 free checks/day, sub-100ms responses, MCP/HTTP/CLI/x402 integrations, MIT-licensed and self-hostable. Built for autonomous agents that move money.
- Consolidated global risk profiles — Dow Jones Risk & Compliance: 4.23M consolidated profiles (July 2024), 24-hour Watchlist update cadence. The alternative when the requirement is breadth of structured entity data for a compliance team, not an inline API gate.
- Screening at exchange scale — Chainalysis and Elliptic: blockchain-analytics vendors whose screening products cover exposure attribution that a list-based sanctions API does not attempt.
- Full-stack KYC/verification — ComplyAdvantage and Sumsub: the alternative when the requirement includes identity verification and document checks rather than pure sanctions screening.
- World-Check itself — for a bank with seat-based procurement and legacy PEP workflows, staying on World-Check is a legitimate answer. See the full documented-facts comparison above and what is and is not knowable about pricing.
How to choose in one line: if the screening decision must happen inside an agent's payment path in milliseconds, list-based API screening (this site's product) is the fit; if the decision happens in a compliance analyst's queue, a consolidated-profile database or screening suite is the fit. The categories overlap in marketing and not much in architecture.