What is Commers?

The problem

Every shipment entering the US needs a customs entry filed with CBP. Today that means a licensed customs broker manually:

1. Reading the commercial invoice + packing list + bill of lading
2. Classifying each line item to a 10-digit HTS code (26,000+ possible codes, ambiguous rules, binding precedent in 250K+ CBP rulings)
3. Screening the importer / consignee / supplier against ~30K sanctioned entities across 8 US government lists
4. Computing duties — base rate + Section 301 / IEEPA / Section 232 additional duties + MPF + HMF
5. Filing the ABI/ACE message with CBP and managing the response

This is slow, error-prone, and expensive. Misclassification is the #1 cause of CBP penalties; a single wrong HTS code can mean years of back-duties. Brokers charge $50-150+ per entry and the expertise is scarce.

Who it's for

Commers serves three sides of the same entry:

• Customs brokers — the licensed customs broker (LCB) operates the workspace and co-signs every entry. The AI clears the routine work and augments the team; it never replaces the broker.
• Importers — mid-market companies filing roughly 500–5,000 entries a year. They are the paying customer and want speed, transparency, and lower cost than a traditional per-entry broker or an in-house customs team.
• Customs authorities — where Commers is headed: the same grounded, auditable classification and screening that makes a broker faster is what a customs authority needs to review entries at scale.

The trust principle

A licensed broker is on record and signs every entry. The AI proposes; the broker approves. High-confidence lines can auto-approve to speed the queue, but Commers never auto-files to CBP — transmission is always a deliberate broker action. (Until direct ACE transmission ships, the broker files the finished entry.)

The value proposition

Customs clearance, tariff intelligence, and denied-party screening — one AI workspace, one supplier graph, one audit trail. Broker-operated, importer-priced, authority-ready.

Concretely, Commers:

• Classifies line items to HTS codes automatically, with calibrated confidence and citable rationale (cites the actual CBP ruling it relied on)
• Screens every party against the full US sanctions-list set in <1 second
• Computes landed cost including the full additional-duty stack
• Routes only the uncertain cases to the broker — high-confidence lines auto-approve, ambiguous ones get co-sign; the broker transmits
• Learns from every broker correction — the classifier gets measurably better as the importer's book of entries grows

Why now

• AI got good enough — frontier models can classify HTS codes accurately when grounded on the right reference data; grounding each classification on live CBP rulings measurably improves accuracy over an ungrounded model
• Tariffs got complicated — Section 301, IEEPA, Section 232 actions now affect ~$370B of imports; the additional-duty math is beyond what a spreadsheet handles
• The data is open — HTSUS, CBP CROSS rulings, and US sanctions lists are all freely available; the moat is in the AI + the workflow + the feedback loop

Positioning

The moat

Not the data (it's public) and not a single AI model. The moat is the closed feedback loop: every broker override on every entry becomes a training example specific to that importer's product taxonomy. The more entries flow through, the more accurate the classifier gets — measurably, tracked in an eval database. A new entrant starts from zero; Commers compounds.

Status

Commers is live in production:

• Workspace live at app.commers.ai — an invite-only broker workspace running on real cleared entries.
• Public tariff tracker live at commers.ai/knowledge; docs at commers.ai/docs.
• Data layer real: 26.6K HTS codes, CBP's rulings database, 31K sanctioned entities, 9 tariff programs.
• AI live: classification, invoice extraction, denied-party screening, landed-cost simulation, duty drawback, and a closed feedback loop — all on real entries. Classification is grounded on live CBP rulings, which measurably lifts accuracy; schema validation means zero hallucinated codes; confidence is calibrated and every classification cites the ruling it relied on.

The one step still on the roadmap is direct ACE transmission to CBP. Until that ships, a licensed broker files the finished entry.