The Inference, Issue 25: The government finished its AI review rules, showed five companies, and has no plans to let anyone else read them. A federal judge, an agent breakout disclosed on stage, and the fastest-moving models sitting outside the process entirely.
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 21: the week Oklahoma's priced gate got a public calendar. The Corporation Commission has reportedly set November 3 as the decision date for the first tariff under the new data-center law, the same day voters decide whether the law's own author joins the Commission. New York, the same morning this issue's gather ran, imposed the nation's first statewide data-center moratorium by executive order rather than by signing its own legislature's bill. Pittsburg County's tabled incentives for a fifty-billion-dollar campus stay parked until the developer answers its neighbors. The gate is real, it now has a date, and the people deciding it are on the ballot.
New York just imposed the nation's first statewide data-center moratorium by executive order. Read the order's fine print and you find the same principle Oklahoma wrote into law: the build-out pays its own way.
The Inference, Issue 20: the week Oklahoma's ratepayer-protection posture produced a real win (a 15 percent power-rate ask negotiated down to about 1 percent for households) while the state's new priced-gate law took effect and awaited its first tariff test, the federal grid regulator forced six regional operators to justify how they connect large loads, other states split between banning data centers and pulling their subsidies, and the AI demand driving all of it cleared to open wider with GPT-5.6's public release. Oklahoma's bet is the priced gate: not a ban, but a bill sent to the load that caused the cost. The first numbers show both that the posture is working and where the household still pays first.
One-page staff brief on SB 259: what the law does, who it applies to, when it was signed, and what large-load data centers must do now.
One-page staff brief on HB 2992: what the law does, who it applies to, its effective date, and what utilities and large-load customers must do now.
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 Inference, Issue 18: two weeks before HB 2992 goes operative, the sharpest data-center fight in Oklahoma was a town of 1,700 pausing a project from a Main Street meeting held outdoors because no building could hold the crowd. The moratorium wave is the level of the stack no tariff reaches: whether the host community agreed at all.
On June 18, the federal energy regulator decided how to handle the data-center grid problem. The decision it made, and the one it avoided, tells you something about how American governance actually works under pressure.
The Inference, Issue 17: HB 2992, Oklahoma's data-center cost-attribution law, goes operative July 1, and on June 16 voters chose the nominee favored to apply it to the first live load.
The Inference: Issue 16: Anthropic disclosed that AI now writes more than 80% of its code the same week Oklahoma's data-center power bill came due before the Corporation Commission.
Oklahoma just became one of the first states to make data centers measure the groundwater they drink. The fight over it was really a fight about who gets to decide what a shared resource is worth.
The Inference: Issue 15: Oklahoma becomes the first state to tie a groundwater permit to data-center cooling architecture.
The Inference: Issue 14: Tribal nations and Oklahoma cities draw their own lines on data centers. Four moratoria in three months. The Pope weighs in. The Energy Secretary disagrees.
The Inference: Issue 13: HB 2992 is signed. The Corporation Commission approves data center tariffs. The OCC primary decides who sits in that chair.
AI policy intelligence brief. Issue 10: In eight days, GPT-5.5, DeepSeek V4, trade wars, Musk in court, and OG&E data center deals. Oklahoma has six days left.
AI policy intelligence brief. Issue 8: Maine passes first data center moratorium, AI governance acceleration, Oklahoma energy policy.