Why Pergamon is the Surge AI for Compliance

Building the data substrate of integrity - a shared, evidence-first knowledge base of risk that goes beyond financial crime.

TL;DR

Compliance has always been framed as a reactive discipline, chasing regulations, screening lists, and managing alerts. But the world of risk is broader, deeper, and more entangled than a sanctions list or a politically exposed person database. Pergamon's mission is to inventory all risk, not just financial crime, and to build the data foundation that allows institutions to reason about integrity, governance, and trust at scale, the same way Surge AI helped AI labs reason about data quality and labeling at scale.

The Problem with Compliance Data

Most compliance systems today are designed around rules, not reality. Lists, PDFs, and feeds built for regulators, not for sense-making. They capture the who, but rarely the why or how.

Risk, however, doesn't stop at the borders of AML or sanctions. It includes:

Governance risk: undisclosed related parties, revolving-door appointments, and influence networks.
Reputational risk: environmental violations, workplace abuse, data leaks, or corruption.
Operational risk: suppliers entangled with embargoed regimes or state-owned enterprises.
Human risk: conflicts of interest, false credentials, social movements, or security breaches.

The compliance map is fragmented. Everyone owns a tile, but no one has the full atlas.

A New Kind of Infrastructure

Pergamon is building the data substrate of integrity, a shared, evidence-first, continuously improving knowledge base of people, organizations, relationships, and events that carry risk significance.

Think of it as an open intelligence loop, structured enough for machines, nuanced enough for humans.

High-fidelity data: sourced from official records, credible media, disclosures, and investigative reporting.
Transparent provenance: every fact tied to evidence, versioned, and reviewable.
Dynamic context: changes over time are tracked, including roles, relationships, ownership, and influence.
Cross-domain reach: political, environmental, governance, social, cybersecurity, and criminal vectors.

The Surge Analogy (and Why It Matters)

Surge AI transformed how machine learning teams think about human feedback and data quality. Pergamon applies that model to compliance and risk:

Replace "labelers" with policy-literate researchers and risk analysts.
Replace "prompts" with signals, corporate filings, sanctions orders, lobbying records, investigative reports.
Replace "datasets" with risk inventories that evolve over time.

The outcome: a living, self-correcting layer that organizations can build trust systems upon, whether they're screening counterparties, modeling ESG exposure, or mapping global influence networks.

How It Works

Ingest: Pull from official registries, sanctions sources, NGO databases, news archives, court records, and disclosures.
Normalize: Align entities across languages, jurisdictions, and schemas.
Enrich: Add relationships, roles, events, and risk annotations.
Validate: Human and machine QA to confirm evidence and resolve ambiguity.
Version: Every update tracked and reproducible, so decisions are defensible.
Feedback: Consortium members can flag issues, submit corrections, and shape taxonomy.

Beyond Financial Crime

The same principles that make good sanctions data - precision, transparency, and lineage - apply to every domain of risk.

ESG and human rights: who's tied to deforestation, forced labor, or pollution fines?
Cyber and data leaks: which vendors or subsidiaries have been breached?
Governance and ethics: which executives recycle through regulatory bodies or shell companies?
Supply chain: who owns the ships, mines, or intermediaries that power global trade?

Pergamon aims to surface the connective tissue, the metadata of risk that helps organizations see patterns before crises.

The Pergamon Consortium

A collaborative framework for truth maintenance:

Contributing members: provide local data, context, and verification expertise.
Consumers: use, test, and provide feedback on the data quality.
Shared governance: ensures open standards, peer review, and transparency.

Together, this community ensures that global risk intelligence remains accurate, ethical, and representative.

Why This Matters

Better context → better judgment. Compliance isn't just about checking boxes; it's about understanding the world.
Evidence-based decisions. Every assertion in Pergamon's data is sourced, dated, and auditable.
Connected view of risk. Instead of siloed alerts, you get a map of influence and exposure.
Ethical intelligence. Focused on public-interest transparency, not surveillance.

Dad explaining to child why risk detection is great - because we use Pergamon data

Closing Thought

Financial crime is only one chapter of the story. The future of compliance will be about integrity, transparency, and systemic risk, all powered by data that's alive, verifiable, and shared.

Pergamon exists to make that possible. Not just better screening - better understanding.