Commerce agent● operational

agents/compliance-validator

Somebody wrote “clinically proven” in 2019. It is still on your listing.

Nobody remembers writing it. No study was ever attached. It has survived four site migrations and two agencies, and it will keep earning revenue right up until the letter arrives.

Verdictpre-publication gate

claim under review

“Proven to cure arthritis pain and eliminate joint inflammation permanently.”

verdictBLOCKED · publication prevented
rule21 CFR § 101.93(g)
whyDisease claim reclassifies product as unapproved drug
rewriteSupports joint flexibility and helps maintain cartilage comfort.*
actionReturned to copywriter agent · not edited in place

Every verdict names the rule · reviewable by your counsel, not taken on trust

The job

Nobody audits copy that is already earning money.

Compliance risk in a catalog is almost never a decision someone made. It is sediment. A freelancer wrote a punchy line in 2019. An agency ported it. A migration carried it across. By now four people have read it and all four assumed somebody more senior had checked.

Meanwhile the rules moved. The Green Guides were revised. A marketplace tightened its trademark policy. Your copy did not change, so nothing flagged.

The exposure is asymmetric in an unpleasant way. A prohibited health claim is not a listing problem, it is a product classification problem. A trademark violation on a marketplace is not an ASIN problem, it is an account problem.

So this agent sits as the last gate before publication, and it does not edit. It returns a verdict with the rule attached, and refuses to let the claim through until somebody with authority resolves it.

One run

Three claims, three verdicts, three rules.

Each verdict cites the provision it rests on. The third claim in every set passes — the agent is a gate, not an obstacle.

Context

Dietary supplement · US listing

2 blocked1 passed

Proven to cure arthritis pain and eliminate joint inflammation permanently.

block
Rule

Dietary supplements may not claim to cure, treat, mitigate or prevent a disease.

21 CFR § 101.93(g)

Reasoning

"Cure" and a named disease together constitute a disease claim, which reclassifies the product as an unapproved drug. This is not a wording problem — no rewrite makes this claim available to a supplement.

Substantiable rewrite

Supports joint flexibility and helps maintain cartilage comfort as part of an active lifestyle.*

Clinically proven to improve mobility in 14 days.

block
Rule

Substantiation required — "clinically proven" requires competent and reliable scientific evidence on file.

FTC Act § 5 · Health Products Compliance Guidance

Reasoning

No study reference exists on this record. The claim may be legitimate once a study is attached; until then it cannot publish.

Substantiable rewrite

Formulated with 1,500 mg glucosamine sulphate per serving.

Contains 1,500 mg glucosamine sulphate per serving.

pass
Rule

Quantitative composition claim, substantiated by the certificate of analysis.

Supported · COA-2291 p.2

Reasoning

The value traces to a certificate of analysis on file and matches the resolved attribute. No action.

Severity

On the rewrites

A rewrite is offered only where a legitimate version of the claim exists. For the arthritis line there is no compliant phrasing that preserves the original meaning — a supplement cannot claim to cure a disease in any wording — so what is offered is a genuinely different, weaker claim, and the agent says so rather than presenting it as an equivalent.

Capability ledger

This is the only agent in the library with Tier 0 autonomy. It is permitted to stop things and nothing else.

Does

Runs as the last gate before publication, so a claim that cannot be substantiated never reaches a live listing in the first place.

Names the specific rule behind every verdict — the CFR section, the Green Guides paragraph, the marketplace policy — so decisions can be reviewed by your counsel rather than taken on trust.

Checks claims against your own resolved record, so "contains 1,500 mg" passes when a certificate of analysis supports it and blocks when nothing does.

Supplies a substantiable rewrite wherever one legitimately exists, and says plainly when one does not.

Re-audits published listings when a rule set changes, because compliance is a moving target and your copy is not.

Will not

Edit a listing directly. It blocks and reports; a human or an upstream agent makes the change.

Soften a prohibited claim into vaguer language that implies the same thing — that is how unsupportable claims survive review.

Approve a claim because a competitor makes it. Their listing is not a legal defence.

Substitute for legal advice. It applies published rules to your text; it does not represent you.

Pass a claim on the basis that it is probably fine. Anything it cannot clear, it escalates.

Invocation

Wired as a gate rather than a step, so nothing can publish around it.

The last thing that runs before anything goes live.

Direct invocation
POST /v1/agents/compliance-validator/run

{
  "listing_id": "lst_44f0c1",
  "rule_sets": ["fda", "ftc_green", "amazon_policy"],
  "market": "US",
  "mode": "gate"
}
Response
{
  "run_id": "run_91ab7c2f",
  "decision": "BLOCKED",
  "claims_reviewed": 3,
  "violations": [
    { "claim": "proven to cure arthritis pain",
      "rule": "21 CFR 101.93(g)",
      "severity": "critical",
      "rewrite_available": true,
      "equivalent": false }
  ],
  "returned_to": "agents/content-copywriter"
}
As a gate

Sits between copy generation and emission. Nothing publishes around it.

On rule change

Re-audits published listings when a regulator or channel revises a rule.

On new market

Re-checks the catalog against the rule sets of a market you are entering.

Scheduled sweep

Audits the live catalog on a cadence, for the copy written before you had a gate.

Deploy

Audit what is already live.

Before wiring a gate for future copy, find out what the last decade left behind. Give us one regulated category and we will return every claim currently published that nothing in your files substantiates, with the rule against each one.

One category · Read-only · Not legal advice · Findings in 10 working days