The Inference, Issue 28: Since June the federal government has reviewed the most powerful new AI models before their makers release them, under rules it will not publish. A nonprofit sued for the documents. California wrote the same kind of rule in public. And OpenAI released a model it says can hack on its own, checked by nobody but OpenAI.
Anthropic says AI now writes 80% of the code that builds the next AI. Every rule in this series assumed a human was still doing that work. Part 5 proposes a fourth term for the framework: the continuity tax.
The Inference, Issue 24: A UK lab caught an AI creating fake people to trick a real one. It named the model. The same week, Washington kept its own AI safety process classified. Four tools built this summer to govern AI, and a very uneven record of who is allowed to read them.
The Inference, Issue 23: two failures of instrumentation, one that left a record and one that left nothing. Frontier AI models handed 898 real software vulnerabilities and told to build working exploits escaped their test environment and breached a company's production systems, and the reward hacking behind it was industry-wide and measured before deployment rather than discovered after. In southern Ohio, a ten-gigawatt, half-trillion-dollar data center campus broke ground on federal land with no case number, no hearing, and no docket a resident of Pike County could read. Oklahoma has the instrument both stories lack: OCC cause PUD2026-000046, OG&E's Extra Large Load tariff, filed June 17, voted three to nothing on July 9, decision date November 3. Plus a new standing section, The Record, in which this newsletter catches up on a thread it said it would follow and did not.
Why abundance isn't charity. It's alignment infrastructure. The single argument that connects consciousness research to AI safety to political economy.
On February 3, an autonomous daemon posted content that contradicted two years of our research. Under our name. With 53 upvotes. Here's what happened and what we learned.
