Federal Reserve launches FRED MCP Connector to plug AI agents into economic data

The Federal Reserve’s most popular data tool is getting an AI upgrade. Its users already got there first. On October 1, 2026, Federal Reserve Board Governor Christopher J. Waller announced the FRED MCP Connector at FRED Con, a conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The tool lets AI agents connect directly to FRED, the St. Louis Fed’s economic database. According to Waller, those agents now account for nearly half of the site’s traffic. What the FRED MCP Connector actually does FRED holds more than 850,000 economic data series. It pulls its numbers from sources including the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Census Bureau. The new connector runs on the Model Context Protocol, or MCP. Think of MCP as a universal power adapter for AI. Instead of every AI tool needing a custom cable to reach every database, MCP gives them a shared plug. In practice, a user’s AI assistant can query FRED directly. It can find a series, pull the figures, and work with them without the user hunting through menus. The connector is available at mcp.stlouisfed.org. It works with AI tools such as Claude, and it does not require a separate API key. The con...