Hi everyone!
Here are this month’s highlights for upcoming changes, allowing you to adjust your integration in advance. Please take a minute to review and plan any updates.
Upcoming changes
Important change: HTTP redirects from data.opensanctions.org (changelog)
Effective date: 2026-08-17
Please check that your configuration supports HTTP 307 redirects for HTTP requests to data.opensanctions.org. Starting in August, the site may redirect users attempting to fetch a specific data export to an updated location.
The canonical location will now be at /artifacts/<dataset>/<version>/, where previously a mix of /datasets/latest/<dataset> and /datasets/YYYYMMDD/<dataset> were used.
The goal of this change is to provide immutable addresses for each data export, helping to more clearly identify versions of the dataset.
New property: abbreviation (changelog)
Effective date (end of backwards compatibility): 2026-09
A new abbreviation property now stores shortened entity names (e.g. ANC, IKEA) separately from full names, allowing more precise matching on acronyms. For backward compatibility, values are currently copied to weakAlias. This backstop will be removed in September 2026. Data users are advised to integrate the new property before then. Support was added in yente 5.1.0.
Breaking change (on-premise yente): Upgrade to Elasticsearch 9 (changelog)
Effective date (end of life for 8): 2027-01-15
Elasticsearch 9 was released in April 2025, and the end of maintenance for version 8 is January 15, 2027. On-premise customers who are using Elasticsearch need to upgrade their Elastic server to version 9 before January 15, 2027. Current versions of yente are already compatible with both version 8 and 9 of the Elastic server, but yente 5.4.0 released in May 2026 is the last version compatible with Elastic server 8. You can find information on how to upgrade a standard single-node setup of Elastic in our documentation. For more advanced setups, please refer to the official Elastic documentation.
We recommend that on-premise customers perform this upgrade together with one of their upcoming upgrades of yente.
Retiring name-based and name-qualified matching algorithms (changelog)
Effective date: 2027-01-18
From January 2027, any /match calls using name-based or name-qualified will automatically start using the new ofac name matcher instead, since it does what name-based originally set out to do.
Dataset removals and deprecations
Lithuania PEPs from the register of private interests (lt_pep_declarations) to be removed August 17th (changelog).
New datasets
Black Sea MoU Port State Control Inspections (ext_black_sea_mou_psc)
Saudi Arabia National Terrorism List (UNSCR 1373) (sa_pcct_terrorism_list)
US BIS Military-Intelligence End Users (us_bis_mieu)
Vietnam MPS List of Terrorist Organizations and Individuals (vn_terrorist_orgs)
And many more!
Quick reference
- Newsletter signup — To get these updates in your inbox
- Data dictionary — Full property and schema documentation
- Crawler planning — See what’s in progress and vote on priorities. Submit new data source requests via the request form or email support@opensanctions.org.
- Changelog — A record of significant data and API changes; see also yente release notes
- Community forum — Questions, discussion, and announcements
- Status page — Live service status and incident history