API versioning and what can change without notice

The CompliAPI public API is versioned in the URL path — every endpoint lives under /api/v1. As long as you integrate against that prefix, you can rely on a stable set of guarantees about what will and will not change without warning.

What can change within v1 without notice

The following are considered backwards-compatible and may be added at any time:

New endpoints and new optional query parameters on existing endpoints.
New fields added to existing response objects — your code should ignore fields it does not recognize rather than treating them as errors.
New entries in list-valued responses, including new source list slugs in lists_checked and in GET /screen/lists, and new keys inside match metadata objects.
New response headers.

What will never change within v1

Existing endpoints, parameters, and response fields will not be removed or renamed.
The meaning of sanctioned (true only for a government sanctions-list hit) and flagged (true for any hit, including crime-intelligence and risk-exposure lists) will not change.
Status-code semantics are fixed: 401 means a missing or invalid token, 402 means a payment challenge or quota exhaustion, and 429 means a rate limit or burst limit.

Breaking changes will only ship under a new version prefix such as /api/v2, and the previous version will remain available through a published migration window.

How deprecations are signaled

If an endpoint or version is ever scheduled for removal, CompliAPI signals it in three ways:

Affected responses gain a Deprecation header as soon as the decision is made, and a Sunset header (per RFC 8594) with the removal date — at least 90 days in advance.
The change is announced on the versioning page and on the affected endpoint's reference page.
The public OpenAPI spec at compliapi.com/openapi.json marks the operation deprecated: true.

As of now, nothing in the current API is deprecated. The same policy applies to the MCP server: tool names and sanctioned/flagged semantics are stable within v1, new tools may appear at any time, and any future tool removal would be announced at least 90 days ahead.