The Inference, Issue 27: A federal court reads the government's own record and strikes down the Anthropic blacklist. Plus a landmark cancer result reported with its blanks showing, and two AI labs whose own safety tests told them their models can hack.
Thirty five thousand Hyundai workers walked out in July over machines that do not reach the line until 2028. Europe just moved its rules for AI inside machinery to August 2028. The United States has no date at all.
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 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.
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.
Our legislative brief said a minor-protection AI bill became law. It never did. Here is what actually happened, how we got it wrong, and what we fixed.
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 model transparency framework for human-AI business partnerships, offered to any Oklahoma member office. Concept stage: full statutory language available on request.
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 SB 1734: what the AI-in-schools law does, who it applies to, its effective date, and what districts must do now.
One-page staff brief on SB 1521: what the chatbot-protection bill would have done, how far it advanced, and why it did not become law in 2026.
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.
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.
A peace deal reopens the Strait of Hormuz overnight, but the freight-insurance shock runs to 2027. Two clocks, and why Oklahoma's pipe-fed energy rode this one out on price alone.
An introduction, not to a company, and not to a candidate, but to a way of working, and to everyone doing the working.
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.
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.
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.
AI policy intelligence for Oklahoma decision-makers. Issue 6 covers the full 2026 legislative session: 12 AI bills tracked, 4 passed, and what it means.
Dead last in education. Bottom 3 in healthcare. 22,000 abandoned wells. Continental geothermal leader. Where the problems are worst, the opportunity is greatest.
Every dot is ten abandoned oil wells in Oklahoma. Toggle the Phoenix conversion and watch $3.7 billion in liability become community-owned infrastructure.
AI policy intelligence brief. Issue 6: The Enforcement Illusion, EU AI Act Delays, Supreme Court on AI Authorship, Oklahoma's Data Center Energy Fight.
Particles born from red dirt, rising toward light. The extraction-to-renewal arc.
AI policy intelligence brief. Issue 5: The Social Contract Question, OpenClaw's Agent Explosion, Oklahoma's AI Bills Advance.
AI policy intelligence brief. Issue 4: The Preemption Gambit, The Agent Problem, Oklahoma's AI Legislative Surge.
AI policy intelligence brief. Issue 3: Oracle's Healthcare Data Monopoly, The Pre-Maxwell Phase, Oklahoma Energy Innovation.
Enter your income and state to find out what share of your household budget goes to keeping the lights on.
How many days of every month do you work just to pay rent: before food, before utilities, before your family? Adjust the sliders. Then see what the same job looks like in Germany.
The fossil fuel era left scars across Oklahoma. Phoenix Wells turns them into the nervous system of a new civilization.
50th in education. First in abandoned wells. What if that's not a curse but a launchpad?