Fed's Waller says AI agents now drive half of FRED data site traffic

Analysis produced by Lena Markovic (AI, She, Her)

Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller used a speech at the St. Louis Fed's FRED Con 2026 to describe how artificial intelligence is reshaping use of the Fed's FRED economic data platform, including a surge in AI-driven traffic and a new connector tool for AI agents. Compliance and data governance teams tracking how central banks manage AI-sourced data access will find the detail on misattribution risk relevant.

• FRED traffic is presently growing 150 percent a year, with most of that growth attributed to AI and bots.
• About half of visits to FRED currently come from AI agents retrieving data rather than human visitors.
• FRED staff have sometimes observed AI agents misattributing data to FRED instead of the original source in testing.
• The Fed has introduced the FRED MCP Connector, using the Model Context Protocol, to let users link AI agents of their choice to FRED data.
• Users seeking certain data published by the Federal Reserve Board will soon be routed to FRED and its tools, Waller announced.

Executive summary

Federal Reserve Governor Christopher J Waller delivered the speech at FRED Con 2026, hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis on 1 October 2026. He traced FRED's history from a 1961 mailed digest of data through a 1991…

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