Trimtab US Trade Ledger — MCP server for US tariff & trade data
What US importers actually paid at the border — free, no API key, no signup.
Official duty receipts by product and origin, monthly since 2017, reconciled monthly against the
US Treasury's own customs receipts (both books: assessed at entry and kept after refunds — May and
June 2026 ran negative). Plus the current HTS rulebook with Federal Register citations, CBP
classification rulings, HS code search, US containerised imports by origin × commodity × gateway
(revision-tracked), and a frozen 2026 archive of own-recorded AIS ship movements. Every response
carries its method, its provenance, and its limits, so your agent can verify instead of trust.
Published by Trimtabist — the independent observatory for US trade.
20 pre-registered ruled studies (nulls published), a public corrections log, and the whole
collection pipeline open at trimtab-pipeline.
Endpoint (streamable HTTP, no auth):
Official MCP registry: com.trimtabist/us-tariff-ledger · 13 tools + an archive router ·
docs for agents: trimtabist.com/llms.txt ·
connect guides: trimtabist.com/connect
Why
Carrier tracking data doesn't mean what it says. The same event label can mean "alongside the dock"
for one carrier and "waiting at anchor" for another — a difference of hours to days, which is
exactly the difference that decides a demurrage clock, a drayage appointment, or a customer
promise. Meanwhile the carriers have been closing their doors to automated readers: several now
block AI crawlers by name in robots.txt, and not one of the top ten runs a public developer
portal.
So the software now making shipping decisions is arguing from paperwork it cannot check. This
instrument offers the other half: physics. A ship is either moving or it isn't; it is either
alongside a container terminal or it isn't. AIS says so, we record it continuously, and we publish
what we see — including what we can't.
Add it to your agent
Claude Code:
Claude Desktop or any MCP client (HTTP transport):
Clients that require stdio:
Use it from code
Or from the shell, with no install:
Or straight over HTTPS — it is plain JSON-RPC:
The tools
US Trade Ledger series tools (Census-recorded port trade + cross-checks):
Gateways: us_la_longbeach us_ny_nj us_savannah us_houston us_charleston us_norfolk
us_oakland us_seattle_tacoma
What it covers — and what it doesn't
An instrument that hides its blind spots isn't an instrument.
- Covered: the eight US container gateways above.
- Recorded but thin: Chennai/Ennore/Kattupalli; JNPT, Mundra, Pipavav, Hazira, Vizhinjam,
Colombo — terrestrial receivers are sparse there, so coverage is partial to absent. Published, not
papered over.
- Not covered: mid-ocean (terrestrial AIS only, no satellite), cargo (AIS sees ships, never
boxes), rates, schedules, or anything a carrier declares rather than does.
- Archive begins 26 July 2026, with one disclosed gap (2026-07-26 17:20Z → 2026-07-27 12:16Z)
from the instrument's first day. Durations that began before recording started are lower bounds,
and say so.
Read the method → — sources, state-machine thresholds,
how container ships are distinguished from bulkers (AIS type codes can't), known limits, and the
correction policy. Written so a stranger can reproduce the numbers, or prove them wrong.
Licence and citation
Data CC BY 4.0, code Apache 2.0. Use it commercially, build on it, redistribute it — with
attribution:
Trimtab AIS (ais.trimtabist.com), built by Mrigank Singh
Not for regulatory or safety-of-life reliance; no warranty. If you find it wrong,
tell me — corrections are published, with the size of the error
quantified.
Built and maintained by Mrigank Singh, who moves containers for a
living — co-founder & COO of Intoglo, an India→US freight forwarder. This is the live-observation layer of the
Trimtab US Trade Ledger, which measures what trade data actually says versus what actually happens.