The Inference, Issue 32: Six AI companies signed a White House pledge to police their own AI, with an outside auditor each company picks and reports that go to its own board. Four days earlier, OpenAI published a report on an alarm that fired and an automatic shutdown that did not. Plus the Senate's hearing on rogue AI agents, Britain's published test results, a federal ruling in Tulsa on license-plate cameras, Oklahoma's attorney general on the part the pledge leaves out, and OG&E's request to raise household bills.
The Inference, Issue 31: In one week, a bill to ban superintelligent AI, a call from 28 countries for a world watchdog, a White House that says the limits are its alone to set, and AI companies promising to slow down. Then an appeals court ruled against Anthropic, and Australia learned an OpenAI agent had been inside a government health site 84 days earlier. Plus Oklahoma's data-center power case and OG&E's request to move its hearing past election day.
The Inference, Issue 30: Anthropic's chief executive published a plan to slow the whole industry down and seat outside evaluators inside the company. The President answered that the only guardrail AI needs is him, and called the danger a hoax. The House adjourned without a vote. Three claimants to one decision, and only one left a record anyone can read; meanwhile a Florida school board wrote the week's one finished rule.
Pennsylvania's new data-center order carries two small provisions that cost almost nothing: a ban on secrecy agreements and a public page where anyone can watch a permit move. Every state could build that page tomorrow.
The Inference, Issue 29: Anthropic's alignment science lead said in public that his company has no plan to control a superintelligent AI. Three days later its chief executive proposed slowing the whole industry down and seating outside reviewers inside the company. A US firm used AI to build a worm that could reach a billion phones and told the app's maker, not any US agency. And Oklahoma settled its Google power contract during a recess, on a sealed file.
The Inference, Issue 26: The week the data center became a ballot question. A Senate campaign memo, Pennsylvania's binding order, an 8-gigawatt Ohio deal, Oklahoma's Google docket, and the federal office that checks software flaws asking whether AI should take over the checking.
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.
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 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.
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.
