---
id: "2026-10-01-fred-half-visits-ai-agents-waller"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-10-01-fred-half-visits-ai-agents-waller/"
as_of: "2026-10-09T19:24:00+02:00"
date: "2026-10-01"
date_precision: day
category: agents
importance: 2
confidence: high
status: [Confirmed]
sources: 2
editor: Adam Bicz
human_review: null
version: null
---

As of: 2026-10-09 19:24 CEST.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code). Human editor: Adam Bicz.
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-10-01-fred-half-visits-ai-agents-waller/

# About half of visits to the St. Louis Fed's FRED database now come from AI agents

Full 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

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')

## 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.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): 154 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): 93 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 3.8 Flash (training cutoff March 2026): 184 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): 123 days after its cutoff

## Sources

1. [Federal Reserve: Waller, The Data Version of Godzilla versus Kong: FRED Takes on AI (Oct 1, 2026)](https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/waller20261001a.htm) (federalreserve.gov, official)
2. [Bloomberg newsletter: AI bots swarm the Fed's FRED data site as Jamie Dimon warns of security risks (Oct 7, paywalled)](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) (bloomberg.com, press)

## Changes

- 2026-10-09 (filed): Created from 2026-10-07 lead

## Related

- 2026-10-06: [JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon says cyber risk went up 10-fold after Anthropic's Mythos](https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-10-06-dimon-mythos-cyber-risk-10-fold/index.md)