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.
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.
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.
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.
A third of the world's helium is trapped behind a closed strait. The containers have a shelf life. When the helium escapes, it leaves Earth permanently. This is what dependency looks like.
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.
Oklahoma's Well Repurposing Act passed 85 to 6, but a single number buried in the bill, a 250 degree threshold, decides whether it unlocks thousands of wells or none.
Every dot is ten abandoned oil wells in Oklahoma. Toggle the Phoenix conversion and watch $3.7 billion in liability become community-owned infrastructure.