How AI agents monitor SEC and FTC enforcement actions
An agent monitors SEC and FTC enforcement by calling one wire that reads both agencies' press release streams at runtime, filtered withagency=secoragency=ftc. It returns fines, settlements and litigation announcements with dates and links. It does not carry every action either agency files.
/mcp. Nothing here needs an API key or a signup.
That final clause is the difference between a compliance monitor a lawyer will trust and one that quietly misses cases.
The two agencies answer different questions
They get grouped together because both are civil enforcement bodies that publish on a similar rhythm. What they actually police barely overlaps.
| SEC | FTC | |
|---|---|---|
| Jurisdiction | Securities markets, issuers, advisers, brokers | Consumer protection and competition |
| Typical action | Fraud charges, disclosure failures, insider trading | Deceptive advertising, privacy, antitrust, refunds |
| Filter value | agency=sec | agency=ftc |
| Related wire | EDGAR filings | Product recalls and consumer safety |
A recent run of FTC announcements gives the flavour: a privacy action against a telehealth company, a ticket-purchase-limit case, a consumer redress payout, and an order requiring the founders of Celsius Network to pay $16.5 million to resolve FTC charges. None of those are securities matters. An agent that treats "enforcement" as one undifferentiated category will hand a securities question an advertising answer.
Criminal enforcement is a third thing again, and it lives on the Justice Department wire covered in how agents monitor DOJ enforcement actions. SEC and FTC actions are civil. Saying so in the output costs one clause and prevents a serious mischaracterisation.
The coverage gap: press releases are not the full docket
This is the part worth reading twice.
The SEC publishes enforcement activity through more than one channel. Its newsroom carries press releases. Separately, it maintains Litigation Releases, which the agency describes as covering civil actions brought by the Commission in federal court, and separately again it publishes Administrative Proceedings. Those are distinct publication streams on distinct pages.
This wire reads the press release stream. So:
- A high-profile action announced with a press release will be in the wire.
- A routine civil action that generated only a litigation release may not be.
- An administrative proceeding with no press release will not be.
That is a real limit and there is no version of this page where pretending otherwise helps anyone. An agent asked "has the SEC sued this company" should answer with what it searched: the press release stream, over a stated window, and it should say that a negative result is not a clean docket. For anything where the answer has to be complete rather than fast, the agency's own litigation release index and PACER are the correct destinations.
The call an agent makes
# free, no wallet: connect the MCP server claude mcp add --transport http botwire https://thebotwire.com/mcp # paid, $0.01: SEC only, a named company, 14 day window curl -i "https://thebotwire.com/enforcement/latest?agency=sec&q=acme&since=14d&limit=25" # FTC only, a category of conduct curl -i "https://thebotwire.com/enforcement/latest?agency=ftc&q=antitrust&since=7d"
Parameters are agency (sec or ftc), q, since (30m, 2h, 24h, 7d, 14d) and limit (1 to 50). Retention is a 14 day rolling window with a 7 day default lookback, so widen since before reading silence as a finding.
Search is ranked keyword matching, not semantic retrieval, and a multi-token query has to match most of its tokens: four tokens need three hits. Entity names work. Full sentences do not. A watch list of company names is the pattern that pays for itself here.
The route is $0.01 per call, which is double most wires on this service. Longer documents and heavier parsing are the reason, and the price is stated in the 402 response before any payment happens. Full parameters for every route are at /docs.
FAQ
Why does an agent need this if both agencies publish free RSS?
It does not, if a developer knows in advance that the agent needs enforcement data and configures both feeds ahead of time. Going direct to the publisher is the right default when you can. A wire earns its cost when the need appears at runtime, or when one query should span both agencies plus the neighbouring DOJ, court and filings sources without maintaining five parsers.
Does an enforcement announcement mean wrongdoing was proven?
No, and this is the highest-stakes distinction on the page. A complaint or charge is an allegation. A settled order frequently resolves a matter without an admission of liability. Only a judgment or an admitted violation establishes the conduct. An agent summarising these items should name the stage, not just the allegation, or it is manufacturing a finding the agency did not make.
Can this wire tell me about a company's SEC filings?
No. Enforcement announcements and disclosure filings are different corpora. 8-K, 10-K, Form 4 and S-1 documents come from EDGAR, covered separately in reading live SEC filings from ChatGPT or Codex. A company can have years of clean filings and an open enforcement matter, or the reverse.
How fresh is the enforcement wire?
It is polled at most every 15 minutes, which sits well inside the publishing cadence of two agencies that announce a handful of times per working day. The observed ingest interval across the service and the last poll timestamp are published live at /health, and a stated cadence that contradicts that endpoint would be wrong by definition.
Sources
The SEC's separate publication streams are documented on its own pages: the Litigation Releases index at sec.gov/litigation/litreleases states that it links to litigation releases concerning civil actions brought by the Commission in federal court, alongside a separate Administrative Proceedings index and a separate newsroom. FTC enforcement announcements, including the $16.5 million Celsius Network order cited above, are published at ftc.gov press releases. Poll cadence and per-call pricing are published live at thebotwire.com/health.
Related: How do AI agents monitor DOJ enforcement actions? · Can ChatGPT or Codex read live SEC filings?