Federal Reserve Economic Data, or FRED, introduced the FRED MCP Connector on October 1, 2026, allowing AI agents to connect directly to its database through the Model Context Protocol. The announcement came from Federal Reserve Board Governor Christopher J. Waller at FRED Con, hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. FRED holds more than 850,000 economic data series sourced from agencies including the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau. The connector works with AI tools such as Claude, does not require a separate API key and supports a BYOAI, or Bring Your Own AI, model. FRED traffic is growing 150% annually, with AI agents accounting for nearly half of visits. Waller said the redesign aims to improve accuracy, documentation and source attribution as automated queries increase, while warning that AI can produce hallucinations, misattribution and other interpretation errors. FRED plans additional AI features for search, visualization and data interpretation, while certain Federal Reserve Board data will soon be routed to FRED and its tools.