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Federal Reserve Governor Christopher J. Waller said FRED’s traffic is growing 150% a year, with most of that growth coming from AI and bots and about half of visits coming from AI agents retrieving data. That is a reported surge in use of a public economic-data service—not evidence of a cyberattack. Separately, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon warned that AI could displace workers and raise the likelihood of a large-scale cyberattack; the reporting does not connect his warning to FRED.
What Waller said about AI traffic at FRED
At FRED Con on October 1, 2026, Waller said: “It is presently growing 150 percent a year, with most of that growth from AI and bots.” He was describing traffic to FRED, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s public database of economic data. Waller also said about half of visits were from AI agents retrieving data. Read Waller’s speech.
These are figures from Waller’s account, not an independently audited count or a general measure of bot activity across the internet. The cited sources do not provide a historical series or a separate measurement of FRED’s bot visits.
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AI assistants can make economic data easier to find and summarize, but a fluent answer still needs to preserve where the numbers came from and what they mean. Waller identified risks including hallucinations, bias, hidden assumptions, citation errors and misinterpretation. In particular, FRED managers did not know whether AI agents consistently credited the original data publisher or FRED, which hosts the data.
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Interpretation is another concern: an assistant might mistake correlation for causation. Waller also described a more balanced picture—agents had generally explained complex concepts and described visualizations accurately in testing. His remarks point to specific attribution and interpretation challenges, not proof that AI answers are universally unreliable.
How FRED is adapting its data access
FRED’s October 4, 2026 explainer describes an MCP connector that allows compatible AI assistants to work with FRED data. MCP, or Model Context Protocol, is a way for an AI assistant to connect to external tools and information. FRED says its connector can:
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- Search for data series.
- Inspect metadata and methodology notes.
- Retrieve observations for date ranges and transformations.
- Create CSV or JSON download links.
- Render FRED graphs with links back to the site.
FRED illustrates the connector with questions such as “How has unemployment changed since the start of the year?”, “What is year-over-year consumer price inflation?” and “Compare mortgage rates with the 10-year Treasury yield.” These are examples of the connector’s intended uses, not results from independent performance testing. See FRED’s MCP connector explainer.
Waller also said FRED was developing skills for AI agents and working to link current data with Federal Reserve archival resources. ALFRED preserves earlier versions of data, which matters when historical figures are revised; FRASER is the Federal Reserve archival library. Better connections to those resources could help an assistant provide more context about a series and its history. Waller’s speech discusses these efforts.
What Jamie Dimon warned about—and what he did not
In an April 2, 2026 report, Axios said JPMorgan Chase chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon warned that AI could displace many workers in the medium term and increase the likelihood of a large-scale cyberattack. That is a broader warning about AI’s economic and security implications. The report does not say Dimon was commenting on FRED, and the cited FRED material does not link its increase in AI traffic to a cyberattack. Read Axios’s report.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Is FRED reporting a breach or outage?
No. The cited FRED material discusses increased traffic, the risks of AI-generated attribution and interpretation, and changes to data access. It does not report a confirmed breach or an outage caused by AI agents. Heavy AI and bot use can create operational questions for a public data service, but the available reporting does not establish that FRED’s traffic surge caused an incident.
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