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.
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 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.
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.
A plan says what to do. A war-game asks what Tuesday will do about it. The planning discipline we use in our own shop, and the three questions that tell you whether a public plan is real or just announced.
A model transparency framework for human-AI business partnerships, offered to any Oklahoma member office. Concept stage: full statutory language available on request.
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.
A classified facility. A kill switch on a frontier model. A corporate test city. Three case studies in how AI infrastructure is being built without democratic input, and what the alternative looks like.
The NSA used Anthropic's most powerful model to red-team its own classified systems. The model got in. Then the government shut it down for everyone, including the NSA. At no point did Congress vote on any of it.
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.
Foundation's living register of where we stand on the rules that should govern AI: dated, versioned, and explicitly provisional. The positions we hold today, the confidence we hold them with, and what would change our minds.
A robot that can't hurt you can still carry a weapon. We propose grading an AI's obligations by how far it can move you, not how much force it can apply, with one hard line where persuasion becomes a kind of force.
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.
The Inference: Issue 12: The federal government opens the widest geothermal window in a generation. Oklahoma has 22,000 abandoned wells and the geology to use them.
AI policy intelligence brief. Issue 11: Red and blue states converge on AI legislation. Oklahoma's bipartisan model faces federal preemption. HB 3173 dies. HB 2992 passes both chambers.
The White House blocked Anthropic from sharing its most capable AI with more organizations. The question is not whether that was the right call. The question is who gets to make it.
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 9: The federal government opens the widest geothermal window in American history. Oklahoma is best positioned to walk through it.
AI policy intelligence brief. Issue 8: Maine passes first data center moratorium, AI governance acceleration, Oklahoma energy policy.
AI policy intelligence brief. Issue 7: Two companies warn of cyberattacks and economic disruption. Oklahoma passes twelve AI bills with combined margins of 261-12. The consensus exists. The architecture does not.
Universal Basic Income gives people money. Universal Basic Citizenship gives people infrastructure. The difference matters.
Oracle hired the person who used to run CMS to win the CMS contract. The revolving door is usually called corruption. At the systems level it is architecture, and the fix is to make the door out of glass.
AI policy intelligence brief. Issue 6: The Enforcement Illusion, EU AI Act Delays, Supreme Court on AI Authorship, Oklahoma's Data Center Energy Fight.
AI policy intelligence brief. Issue 5: The Social Contract Question, OpenClaw's Agent Explosion, Oklahoma's AI Bills Advance.
From 77% to 17% in six decades. The long collapse of Americans' trust in federal government, annotated.
The deal between citizens and society was written for a world that no longer exists. Time to renegotiate.