@pipeworx/trade-compliance

US import compliance — CBP customs ruling letters (CROSS) and antidumping / countervailing duty (AD/CVD) orders. Keyless, no auth.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1866+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Answers the two questions the tariff schedule alone cannot: how has Customs classified this product before and is there a trade-remedy duty on it from this country.

Tools

• cross_search(query, hts?, since?, limit?) — search CBP CROSS ruling letters for tariff classification precedent. Returns ruling number, date, subject, assigned HTS numbers, and whether the ruling was later modified or revoked.

• cross_ruling(ruling_number, max_chars?) — one ruling letter in full: the facts, CBP's analysis, and the holding.

• adcvd_orders(product?, country?, hts?, limit?) — AD/CVD orders by product and/or country, grouped per product-country pair with current status and case numbers.

• adcvd_case(case_number | document_number) — every Federal Register notice on file for one AD/CVD case.

Related MCP server: HS Code Classifier MCP Server

Auth

None. Both upstreams are public US government endpoints with no key and no registration.

Two things that will bite you

AD/CVD scope is set by scope language, not by HTS code. The HTS numbers in an AD/CVD notice are advisory cross-references. Merchandise can be in scope under an HTS code that looks unrelated, or out of scope under one that looks like a match. Never conclude "not covered" because an HTS code is absent — read the scope language in the linked notice. Every adcvd_orders response carries this as scope_note.

adcvd_orders reports recent order activity, not a census. It searches the 100 most recent matching Federal Register notices, newest first. China has hundreds of AD/CVD orders in place; a country-only query returns the handful with recent order, continuation, or revocation notices. Treat an absence as "no recent notice found", not "no order exists". Every response carries this as coverage_note.

Status values

adcvd_orders resolves a status per product-country pair:

The partial case is the common one and the dangerous one to flatten: reporting it as revoked would tell an importer a duty is gone when it still applies to them.

Notes on the upstreams

• CROSS returns HTTP 500 for a ruling number that does not exist, not a 404, and serves its SPA's index.html with a 200 for any unknown path. cross_ruling therefore probes with a second search call to tell "no such ruling" (reason: ruling_not_found) from a genuine outage (reason: upstream_error), and every response is JSON-parsed rather than trusted by status.

• CROSS search rows carry tariffs/categories; the detail endpoint returns them null. cross_ruling merges the search row so tariff numbers are present either way.

• AD/CVD case numbers come from the Federal Register list endpoint's docket_ids — no per-document fetch needed. Elements are sometimes one code and sometimes several comma-joined in a single string, so codes are regexed out of the joined array rather than trusted per element.

• Federal Register full-text search is noisy: a query mentioning China returns notices about Japan. Product and country are parsed out of the notice title and filtered on the parsed values, never on the query terms.

• Order type comes from case-number prefixes (A- antidumping, C- countervailing), not title text — titles share "Duty" across a conjunction ("Antidumping and Countervailing Duty Orders"), which defeats naive phrase matching.

Related packs

• hts — the duty rates themselves (MFN, FTA preferential, Section 301/232 add-ons).

• sanctions-screening — restricted-party and forced-labor screening, including the DHS UFLPA Entity List.

• census-trade, comtrade — trade flows.

Data sources

• CBP CROSS: https://rulings.cbp.gov/api/search, https://rulings.cbp.gov/api/ruling/<number>

• Federal Register (International Trade Administration notices): https://www.federalregister.gov/api/v1/documents.json

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "trade-compliance": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/trade-compliance/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/trade-compliance/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1866+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/cross_search \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"query":"lithium ion battery pack","limit":5}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/cross_search. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Run it from npm

@pipeworx/mcp-trade-compliance is a local stdio bridge to the Pipeworx gateway: your MCP client starts it with npx, and it forwards every call to the same https://gateway.pipeworx.io/trade-compliance/mcp endpoint shown above. It needs network access; there is no offline mode.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "trade-compliance": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-trade-compliance"]
    }
  }
}

Without a key it calls anonymously, capped at 50 calls a day. A free account raises that to 200 a day: get a key at https://pipeworx.io/signup and add "env": { "PIPEWORX_API_KEY": "<your key>" } to the server entry. The key is sent as a Bearer token, the same way a hosted connection sends it, so calls are metered and billed exactly as they are there.

It lists only this pack's tools by default. Set PIPEWORX_META_TOOLS=1 to also list ask_pipeworx and the other gateway-wide tools.

Behind an HTTPS proxy: Node's built-in fetch does not read HTTPS_PROXY by default. Newer Node releases honour it when NODE_USE_ENV_PROXY=1 is set; check your Node version's documentation.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Trade Compliance data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides

• pipeworx.io

License

MIT