How AI agents track new US federal regulations
An AI agent tracks new US regulations by querying the Federal Register at runtime and filtering by document type: final rule, proposed rule, notice, or presidential document. Each item carries an agency, a publication date, and a link. A model without retrieval cannot know about any rule published after its cutoff.
/mcp. Nothing here needs an API key or a signup.
Regulatory monitoring is a good fit for an agent and a poor fit for a person, because the volume is high and the relevance rate is low. In 2025 the Federal Register published 2,441 final rules, 1,498 proposed rules and 471 presidential documents. Almost none of them apply to you, and finding the ones that do is exactly the filtering job you would rather not do by hand.
The four document types, and why the distinction matters
| Type | Filter value | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Final rule | rule | Binding. Has an effective date. Compliance clock starts. |
| Proposed rule | proposed-rule | Not binding yet. Has a comment period, so it is your window to respond. |
| Notice | notice | Meetings, information collections, agency announcements. High volume, low signal. |
| Presidential document | presidential | Executive orders, proclamations, memoranda. |
An agent that treats all four the same will alert on 10 times the volume it should. The two that usually warrant a notification are rule, because something became binding, and proposed-rule, because a comment window opened and windows close.
The call an agent makes
# free preview, top 3 results, no payment and no wallet curl "https://thebotwire.com/reg/preview?q=hydrogen&since=3d" # paid, $0.005: final rules mentioning your topic in the last 3 days curl "https://thebotwire.com/reg/latest?q=hydrogen&type=rule&since=3d&limit=10" # executive orders and proclamations curl "https://thebotwire.com/reg/latest?type=presidential&since=14d"
Parameters are q (keyword, agency or program name), type (the four values above), since (30m, 2h, 24h, 3d, 14d) and limit (1 to 50). The default window on this wire is 3 days rather than 24 hours, because the Federal Register publishes one dated edition per business day and a 24-hour window will silently skip an edition over a weekend or holiday.
Building a monitor that does not cry wolf
Three design choices separate a monitor an operator trusts from one they mute.
- Query terms, not agencies. Rules that affect you rarely come from one place.
A term like a chemical name, a program name or a CFR part catches the agency you did not think to watch.
- Alert on
ruleandproposed-rule, digest the rest. Notices are worth a
weekly summary and are not worth a page at 4am.
- Give the agent the empty case. Most days nothing relevant publishes. A wire
that returns zero items lets the agent say so, which is the difference between a quiet monitor and one that invents a rule to justify its run. That failure is covered in why agents hallucinate recent events.
A daily sweep over 10 search terms is 10 calls, or about $1.50 a month at $0.005 a call. The economics only work because you are not renting a compliance platform to find out that nothing happened.
Reading the primary source instead of coverage of it
The gap between a rule and an article about a rule is where regulatory agents go wrong. Coverage lags by a day, omits the effective date, and sometimes describes a proposed rule as though it were final. Every item on this wire carries the Federal Register document type, the agency, the publication date and a link to the document itself, so an agent can quote the source rather than a summary of it.
The same argument applies across the primary-source wires. Filings come from EDGAR, advisories come from CISA, and rules come from the Federal Register. The routing table lists which endpoint owns which question, and how agents get real-time data compares this to search and scraping.
FAQ
Can I just use the Federal Register API directly?
Yes, and it is free and well documented. Do that if the Federal Register is the only source your agent needs. The reason to use a wire instead is that regulatory agents rarely stop at one source: the same agent usually wants filings, enforcement actions and agency press releases too, and one call pattern across 40 wires beats five bespoke integrations with five schemas.
How quickly does a new rule appear?
The Federal Register publishes one edition per business day, dated at 04:00 GMT, so publication cadence is the binding constraint rather than poll frequency. The observed interval between ingest runs on this service is about 299 seconds and is published live at /health.
Does this cover state regulations or the CFR?
No. This wire carries Federal Register documents, which means new federal actions. It does not carry state registers and it is not a codified CFR lookup. Claiming otherwise would set up an agent to miss something and report nothing, which is worse than the agent knowing the boundary.
How do I track a comment deadline?
Filter type=proposed-rule and read the document link, which carries the comment period end date. The wire tells the agent a proposal exists; the document tells it when the window closes. Pair that with a funded agent wallet and the whole loop runs unattended.
Sources
Document counts on this page come from the Federal Register REST API, queried for documents published in 2025 by type: 2,441 rules, 1,498 proposed rules and 471 presidential documents.
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