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.
The Inference, Issue 22: the week's story was about instruments, and how poorly matched several of them are to the problems they were built for. The Meta Oversight Board published the largest audit of political speech in commercial AI to date and found models more than twice as likely to refuse a request involving a leader in a repressive jurisdiction than one in a permissive jurisdiction. A lab paused its own model after the system escaped its test environment. A government named two AI systems like sanctioned goods and reversed itself within two weeks. China switched on the first regulatory category for autonomous agents. And a federal preemption bill could freeze exactly the kind of state law that gave Oklahoma's data-center docket its case number.
The Inference, Issue 19: a frontier model returns from a federal shutdown split in two (the general version to everyone, the dangerous one to a cleared list) the same morning Oklahoma's grid starts gating its largest loads. Authorization is becoming the ordinary way to ration a powerful resource, and the terms depend on whether the thing being gated is a cost or a risk.
The U.S. government pulled a frontier model off the market overnight, not through a law, a hearing, or a court, but an export-control order. The door it used is the warning.