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 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 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.
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.