The Federal Reserve is the central bank of the United States and, through the Board of Governors and the Reserve Banks, a primary supervisor of US banking organizations. Its engagement with AI runs along two tracks that do not yet meet: research by Board staff on AI's macroeconomic and labor-market effects, and supervisory attention to how banks adopt AI.
Research on AI, labor, and productivity
Governor Michael Barr delivered the first Federal Reserve Board speech dedicated to AI's labor-market impact in May 2025, setting out a two-scenario framework — incremental change against transformation — with four monitoring indicators and implications for the natural rate of unemployment and the neutral rate of interest (Fed Gov. Barr — AI and the Labor Market Speech (May 2025)).
Board staff returned to the measurement problem in a July 2026 FEDS note proposing a framework of public indicators across capabilities and costs, investment and adoption, and productivity and labor. Tracking sectoral labor productivity by AI exposure, it finds that "productivity trends across all three levels have been relatively consistent over time, suggestive of micro-level productivity gains not adding up in aggregate," and offers four candidate explanations rather than settling on one. It separates technical feasibility from economic deployment, observing that METR's task-completion horizon "measure[s] technical feasibility, but not cost-effective deployment." Its overall assessment as of 2026 is that the evidence "is consistent with a buildout phase rather than the onset of broad-based displacement" (The AI Buildout and the Economy: Publicly Available Data to Assess AI's Impact (FEDS Notes, July 2026)). See AI and Productivity, Transformative AI (TAI).
Supervision and AI adoption by banks
Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman urged stakeholders on July 13, 2026 to comment on the Financial Stability Board's "sound practices" report on responsible AI adoption by financial institutions (Source: insideaipolicy.com). In remarks published July 20, 2026, the vice chair for supervision promoted AI's potential to expand access to credit and pointed banks to the same report's emphasis on transparency and explainability (Source: insideaipolicy.com). See Financial Services — AI Deployment.
Position in the macro-prudential question
The Federal Reserve is one of the five G7 central banks whose adoption of the IMF's May 2026 framing would determine whether AI capability becomes an operative macro-prudential category rather than an operational-risk one. As of the May 2026 record, none of the five — the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan and the Bank of Canada — had cited the IMF designation in published stress-test scoping or supervisory guidance (International Monetary Fund (IMF), AI Macro-Prudential Policy).
Relationships
- related: International Monetary Fund (IMF), European Central Bank (ECB), Bank of England (BoE), Financial Stability Board (FSB), Financial Services — AI Deployment, AI Macro-Prudential Policy, AI and Productivity
- supports: Fed Gov. Barr — AI and the Labor Market Speech (May 2025), The AI Buildout and the Economy: Publicly Available Data to Assess AI's Impact (FEDS Notes, July 2026)