Federal Reserve Opens Economic Database to AI Agents

The Federal Reserve has unveiled the FRED MCP Connector, a tool that lets artificial intelligence agents directly access the FRED database without relying on humans to navigate its menus and charts.

FRED is a sprawling economic database with over 850,000 data series drawn from sources such as the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Census Bureau.

The new connector runs on the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and works seamlessly with AI tools like Claude, eliminating the need for a separate API key.

FRED Governor Christopher J. Waller announced the launch at FRED Con, citing that AI agents already account for nearly half of all visits to the FRED website, with traffic growing at an annual rate of 150%.