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 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.
