How an agent builds a daily regulatory briefing for one industry
An agent builds a daily regulatory briefing by calling five wires in one order: the Federal Register for what is now in force, enforcement actions for how the agency reads it, court opinions for whether it survives, presidential actions and new bills for what is coming. Five calls cost $0.04.
/mcp. Nothing here needs an API key or a signup.
A regulatory briefing is not a volume problem. It is an ordering problem, because the same document means different things depending on which of the five layers it sits in.
The Federal Register is the anchor, not the whole picture
A rule exists legally when it is published in the Federal Register, so that wire runs first and everything else is read against it. It is also the layer that sets the filtering burden. In 2025 the Federal Register published 2,441 final rules and 1,498 proposed rules, roughly 3,900 rule-type documents across about 250 business days, or 16 a day before any industry filter is applied.
Fifteen or so of those 16 are irrelevant to any single industry, which is why a briefing needs a q term and a type filter rather than a feed reader. The Federal Register also publishes on federal business days only, so a Monday run covering since=3d reads one publication day, not three, and a Saturday run reads none.
The five layers, and why the order is what it is
| Step | Layer | Route | What it settles | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | In force | /reg/latest | Proposed and final rules | $0.005 |
| 2 | Applied | /enforcement/latest | How the agency reads the rule | $0.01 |
| 3 | Contested | /court/opinions | Whether the rule survives | $0.01 |
| 4 | Directed | /whitehouse/actions | Executive orders aimed at agencies | $0.005 |
| 5 | Legislated | /bills/latest | Statutory change further out | $0.01 |
Steps 1 to 3 describe the present and step 3 outranks the other two: an agency's reading of its own rule is authoritative right up until a court vacates it, and a briefing that reports an enforcement posture without checking whether it has been struck down is confidently wrong. Reading them in that order is what stops the summary contradicting itself.
Steps 4 and 5 are the pipeline rather than the present. Presidential documents numbered 471 in 2025, close to two a business day, and most direct an agency to start a process that surfaces in step 1 months later. Both belong in a briefing under "what is coming", kept separate from what is in force, because conflating the two is the error this composition most invites.
Swapping step 2 for the sector's own regulator
Step 2 is the only step that changes by industry:
| Industry | Step 2 route | Filter |
|---|---|---|
| Financial services | /enforcement/latest | agency=sec |
| Derivatives and commodities | /cftc/latest | src=cftc |
| Pharma and medical devices | /fda/latest | src=fda |
| Energy | /energy/latest | src=eia or doe |
| Employers and workplace safety | /labor/latest | src=dol or osha |
| Platforms and consumer tech | /digitalrights/latest | src=ftc or eff |
Wire-level detail is in how AI agents track new US federal regulations, how AI agents monitor SEC and FTC enforcement actions and how AI agents read new federal court opinions.
The whole chain, one call at a time
# free, no payment, no items: browse every wire, its filters and its price claude mcp add --transport http botwire https://thebotwire.com/mcp # 1. what is in force ($0.005) curl -i "https://thebotwire.com/reg/latest?q=medical%20device&type=rule&since=3d&limit=10" # 2. how the regulator is applying it ($0.01) curl -i "https://thebotwire.com/fda/latest?q=device&since=3d&limit=10" # 3. whether a court has touched it ($0.01) curl -i "https://thebotwire.com/court/opinions?q=FDA%20device&since=7d&limit=5" # 4. what the White House has directed ($0.005) curl -i "https://thebotwire.com/whitehouse/actions?q=health&since=14d&limit=5" # 5. what Congress has introduced ($0.01) curl -i "https://thebotwire.com/bills/latest?q=medical%20device&since=7d&limit=5" # five calls, $0.04 total, USDC on Base, no API key and no signup
The windows widen down the list on purpose. Steps 1 and 2 run 3 days because a daily briefing repeats itself otherwise; steps 3 to 5 run 7 to 14 days because courts, the White House and Congress publish less often, and a 24 hour window on those returns nothing most days. Every route, filter and price is machine readable at /llms-full.txt.
What this chain cannot tell a compliance reader
Four gaps, stated plainly, because a reader who hits one unwarned does not come back.
No state regulators. All five wires are federal. State attorneys general, state banking and insurance departments, utility commissions and state privacy regulators sit outside the chain, and for many industries they generate more day-to-day obligation than the federal layer. Each state's own register is where that lives.
No docket contents. The chain reports that a proposed rule was published. It does not carry the comment docket, the supporting economic analysis, or the agency's response to comments, which is where the substance of a proposed rule usually is. That material is on regulations.gov.
No rule text and no CFR mapping. Headlines, links and summaries only. The chain will not tell you which sections of the Code of Federal Regulations a final rule amends or what the amended text now says. The eCFR and the rule document itself are the sources for that.
No compliance calendar. Nothing here computes an effective date, a comment deadline or a phase-in schedule. Those dates sit inside the document, and reading them out is a step the agent takes after this chain hands it a link.
FAQ
Is five calls the right depth every day?
No. Steps 1 and 2 carry most daily briefings at $0.015 and are the two that change most often. Steps 3 to 5 move on a slower clock, so running them weekly rather than daily costs $0.025 a week instead of $0.175 and loses very little. An agent on a budget should spend it on the layers that actually move.
How is this different from subscribing to a regulator's own feed?
The regulator's feed is free and covers one layer. What this composes is five layers behind one query grammar, one window parameter and one payment path, so a briefing does not need five parsers and five schedules. The tradeoff is that a publisher's own feed carries its full document set, while these wires carry headlines, links and summaries.
How current is each wire in the chain?
All five sit in the sparse tier, polled at most every 15 minutes, which is well inside the cadence of bodies that publish daily at most. Retention runs up to 30 days on sparse government wires, so a missed day is recoverable by widening since. The last poll timestamp is published live at /health.
What does a briefing cost at volume?
Five calls at $0.04 per industry per run. Briefing 10 industries on each of about 250 business days is 2,500 runs, or $100 a year in USDC on Base with no subscription and no minimum. Running steps 3 to 5 weekly instead of daily takes the same programme to roughly $50.
Sources
Document counts come from the publisher itself. The Federal Register API reports 2,441 final rules, 1,498 proposed rules and 471 presidential documents published in 2025, and zero documents for Sunday 2 August 2026, all read on 9 August 2026. Poll cadence and per-call pricing for this service are published at thebotwire.com/health.
Related: How do AI agents track new US federal regulations? · How do AI agents monitor SEC and FTC enforcement actions?