About half of visits to the St. Louis Fed’s FRED database now come from AI agents
FRED launches an MCP connector
Confirmed
The takeaway
In an Oct 1, 2026 speech at FRED Con, Fed Governor Christopher Waller said about half of visits to FRED, the St. Louis Fed’s widely used economic database, are AI agents retrieving data, and that traffic is growing 150% a year, mostly from AI and bots.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 9 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra154 days after its cutoff
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- Grok 4.7123 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 93 days before it.
Key facts
- Speech: ‘The Data Version of Godzilla versus Kong: FRED Takes on AI’, FRED Con 2026, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Oct 1, 2026
- Waller: ‘Already about half of visits to FRED are from AI agents retrieving data, with the other half from flesh-and-blood visitors.’
- Waller: traffic ‘is presently growing 150 percent a year, with most of that growth from AI and bots.’
- FRED MCP Connector: uses the Model Context Protocol so users can ‘find and retrieve data from FRED using an AI agent of their choice’; FRED is also developing skills for agents
- Caveats he listed: AI can hallucinate, introduce bias, hide assumptions and misattribute data sources, though agents have generally described FRED charts accurately
- Bloomberg’s Oct 7 newsletter picked up the figure (‘AI bots swarm the Fed’s FRED data site’)
What happened
A Fed governor gave a rare measured number for agent traffic on a core public data source: roughly half of FRED’s visits are AI agents. FRED responded by publishing an MCP connector rather than blocking bots.
Why it matters
It is a concrete data point on how fast agents are becoming the main consumers of public reference data, and an example of an institution adapting its access layer (MCP) for them.
Sources
2 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 1 primary, 1 press
Primary
- Federal Reserve: Waller, The Data Version of Godzilla versus Kong: FRED Takes on AI (Oct 1, 2026)federalreserve.gov, official
Press
Changes
- Filed from 2026-10-07 lead