The Fed's 35-year open data bet is a model for the AI era
A commentary argues that the St. Louis Fed's FRED database, which has served open economic data for 35 years and now sees roughly half its users as automated systems, offers a practical model for how government agencies should structure public data in an environment increasingly shaped by AI.
Why this matters: Most government data is a mess for machines to read. FRED became useful because it was designed to be queried, not just browsed. That design choice, made decades ago, now means AI systems can pull clean data without scraping or guessing. Agencies that still publish PDFs and unstructured tables are effectively locking their data away from modern tools. The gap between open-data done right and open-data done poorly will widen fast as AI use grows. Who gets to access and build on public information depends heavily on how governments choose to publish it.
Who should care: General readers · AI governance · Policy
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