{"schema":"postcutoff/event@1","as_of":"2026-10-09T19:24:00+02:00","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-10-01-fred-half-visits-ai-agents-waller/","md":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-10-01-fred-half-visits-ai-agents-waller/index.md","disclosure":{"written_by":"AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code)","editor":"Adam Bicz","policy":"https://postcutoff.com/about/"},"license":null,"id":"2026-10-01-fred-half-visits-ai-agents-waller","date":"2026-10-01","date_precision":"day","short_title":"Fed Governor Waller","deck":"About half of visits to the St. Louis Fed's FRED database now come from AI agents; FRED launches an MCP connector","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.","category":"agents","category_label":"Agents","importance":2,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":[{"n":1,"title":"Federal Reserve: Waller, The Data Version of Godzilla versus Kong: FRED Takes on AI (Oct 1, 2026)","url":"https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/waller20261001a.htm","type":"official","group":"primary","domain":"federalreserve.gov"},{"n":2,"title":"Bloomberg newsletter: AI bots swarm the Fed's FRED data site as Jamie Dimon warns of security risks (Oct 7, paywalled)","url":"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-10-07/ai-bots-swarm-the-fed-s-fred-data-site-as-jamie-dimon-warns-of-security-risks","type":"press","group":"press","domain":"bloomberg.com"}],"official":1,"filed":"2026-10-09","updated":"2026-10-09","orgs":["Federal Reserve","Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis"],"title":"Fed Governor Waller: about half of visits to the St. Louis Fed's FRED database now come from AI agents; FRED launches an MCP connector","summary":"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. FRED introduced a FRED MCP Connector so users can pull its data with an AI agent of their choice.","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')"],"key_numbers":[],"tags":["agents","mcp","web-traffic","public-data","economics","central-bank"],"science":null,"body_md":"## What happened\n\nA 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.\nFRED responded by publishing an MCP connector rather than blocking bots.\n\n## Why it matters\n\nIt is a concrete data point on how fast agents are becoming the main consumers of public reference data, and an example of an\ninstitution adapting its access layer (MCP) for them.","disputed":[],"related":[{"id":"2026-10-06-dimon-mythos-cyber-risk-10-fold","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-10-06-dimon-mythos-cyber-risk-10-fold/","date":"2026-10-06","date_precision":"day","short_title":"JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon says cyber risk went up 10-fold after Anthropic's Mythos","deck":null,"takeaway":"The head of the largest US bank, himself a Glasswing participant, put a number on how much frontier AI has changed cyber risk.","category":"policy-safety","category_label":"Policy & safety","importance":3,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":5,"official":0,"filed":"2026-10-07","updated":"2026-10-07","orgs":["JPMorgan Chase","Anthropic"]}],"people":[],"posts":[],"videos":[],"models":[],"changes":[{"date":"2026-10-09","type":"filed","text":"Created from 2026-10-07 lead"}],"provenance":{"agents":[{"model":"Claude Opus 5.5","maker":"Anthropic","tool":"Claude Code"}],"filed":"2026-10-09","run":null,"sources_read":"2026-10-07 lead","updated":"2026-10-09","human_review":null,"version":null},"gaps":[{"model_id":"gpt-6-astra","name":"GPT-6 Astra","cutoff":"2026-04","days_after":154,"in_training_data":false},{"model_id":"claude-opus-5-5","name":"Claude Opus 5.5","cutoff":"2026-06","days_after":93,"in_training_data":false},{"model_id":"gemini-3-8-flash","name":"Gemini 3.8 Flash","cutoff":"2026-03","days_after":184,"in_training_data":false},{"model_id":"grok-4-7","name":"Grok 4.7","cutoff":"2026-05","days_after":123,"in_training_data":false}],"short_url":null}