There is a sentence missing from the Anthropic report.
The report is about what happens when an AI system starts building itself: writing the code, testing the changes, training a better version, then doing the whole thing again. That cycle is what the report calls a recursion loop, and Part 5 of this series took it apart.
The report is careful in most other respects. It names the loop. It measures the loop. It reports, with the qualifications good researchers bring to surprising findings, what the loop is now producing. More than eighty percent of the code going into the company’s own software is now written by the AI rather than typed by a person. Engineers are shipping roughly eight times as many lines of code per day, though the authors themselves say a count of lines measures volume and not value. On one narrow repeated test, the AI got fifty-two times faster. And on a set of research decisions the authors picked because the human had the most room to improve, the AI made the better call sixty-four percent of the time.1 It argues, in its closing pages, that the world should keep the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier development.
What the report does not mention is the wire.
Every turn of the loop is compute. Every unit of compute is a data center. Every data center draws power from a substation and water from a basin, and the substation and the basin are governed by institutions that do not appear anywhere in the recursion conversation. The loop runs on a grid. The grid runs through a state. The state has a legislature. The legislature has been writing law about all of this for the last eighteen months while the recursion conversation has been happening in a different room.
This broadsheet is about the room next door.
The omission
Read the Anthropic report one more time with the energy term in mind.
The scenario in which the lab’s internal compute infrastructure is now maintained almost entirely by the AI is also a scenario in which the lab’s compute consumption is rising. The work the report describes (the AI proposing and testing its own experiments, training and retraining candidate models to hit a goal a human set) is made of training runs, and every training run is a load on a cluster, and every cluster is a wattage. The report celebrates the productivity. The report does not cost out the productivity.
This is not a moral failing of the report. It is a research note from a single company, addressed to a research audience. Asking it to do the energy accounting of its own loop is asking it to do work the rest of the field has also declined to do. We mention the omission to name what the standard has to add. Call it the energy term: whoever is answerable for how a machine moves people is also answerable for the power, the water, and the land the machine burns to do it.
The standard has to add this: the recursion loop is a power-consuming, water-consuming, land-consuming process, and the governance of those substrates is part of the governance of the loop. The substrate is the physical stuff the loop runs on. The power grid. The water supply. The ground the building sits on. A standard that does not reach the substrate is governing only the upper half of the system. The lower half, the half that touches the ground, is being governed elsewhere, by different institutions, on a different timeline.
The two governance conversations are the same conversation. They are being held in different rooms by different people who do not yet know they are talking about the same thing.
The room next door
Oklahoma is in the room next door.
The state is not the only place this is happening, but it is the place where the substrate conversation has moved fastest and most concretely. The legislative session that adjourned on May 14 produced two signed laws, and the tribal and municipal governments moved alongside them. Taken together they are the most complete answer any state has produced to the question of what a data center owes the community it lands on.
We name the stack so the rest of the broadsheet can refer to it.
House Bill 2992. Signed May 11. The bill addresses cost. To a utility, a “load” is simply how much electricity a customer draws, and a data center is an enormous one. Any customer that signs up for seventy-five megawatts or more of new load after July 1, 2026, at one site or behind one connection point, becomes its own class of customer with its own tariff. A tariff here is not a trade tax. It is the rate schedule a utility files with the state, setting what a class of customer pays and on what terms. Seventy-five megawatts is about what sixty thousand homes draw. That tariff has to make those customers pay the costs fairly allocated to them, including the costs that would otherwise be left behind if they walk away or cut their load, and it has to hold them for at least ten years. The House passed it 92–2 in March. Both chambers took the final vote on May 5, the Senate unanimously. It binds cooperatives and municipal utilities, not just the two big investor-owned companies.2
Senate Bill 259. Signed May 20, effective November 1. The bill addresses water, and it does less than its own title says. It bars a data center from getting a groundwater permit if it cools by evaporating the water, and it requires the Water Resources Board to audit the annual use reports it already collected and to fine people who overdraw. It does not require anyone to install a water meter. The metering mandate the bill started with came out along the way. The governor, who had vetoed a metering bill from the same two authors two years earlier, signed this one. The trade group NetChoice asked him to veto it the day after he signed, and what NetChoice objected to was the cooling rule, not the reporting.3
Tribal action. The Seminole Nation of Oklahoma voted 24–0 in March for a moratorium, a hold on new construction, on hyperscale data center development on its lands. Hyperscale is the industry’s word for the largest class of these buildings, the warehouse-scale facilities built to run AI, each drawing power on the order of a small city. The Seminole vote made that Nation the first tribal government in the state to take a general action of that kind.4 The Cherokee Nation studied the question for five months and then answered it: on August 5 the Nation released its task force report and Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. banned hyperscale data center development on tribally owned and trust land.5 The Muscogee Nation National Council rejected a data center proposal in November 2025 on land the Nation had bought for food sovereignty.6 Each of these is a sovereign jurisdictional act, not a comment letter. Since McGirt v. Oklahoma in 2020, roughly forty-three percent of the state’s land sits within Five Tribes reservation boundaries. Neither HB 2992 nor the Corporation Commission’s tariff authority reaches inside those boundaries on its face, and how much civil-regulatory authority the state keeps there is a question the courts are still working through.7
Municipal moratoria. Tulsa and Oklahoma City enacted unanimous moratoria in late March and April, both running through the end of this year, and both carrying exemptions for projects already in the pipeline. Pawhuska, a town of about 3,500, passed its own on a 3–2 vote of the city’s public works authority.8 Sand Springs voters filed papers to recall their entire city council after the council approved a Google data center rezoning 6–1. The recall gathered more than 1,600 signatures and cleared the raw threshold in three of seven wards, then fell short on signature validity in May.9
The Brockovich map. Erin Brockovich launched a crowdsourced national reporting site at brockovichdatacenter.com on April 27. As of August 9 it had collected 9,031 reports from all fifty states. Water is the most frequent concern by a wide margin, named in about forty-one percent of the reports, with electricity and the grid second at about twenty-two percent.10
Five elements. One state at the front of all five. No peer state has the complete set.
We are not arguing that Oklahoma’s stack is sufficient. Part of it, as the water chapter below shows, is thinner than its own title claims. We are arguing that it is the first plausible answer to a question the recursion conversation has not yet noticed it has to answer. The substrate the loop runs on is not free, and the institutions that decide what the substrate costs are awake.
The substation
A useful instance, because it has a docket number. A docket number is the tracking number a state agency puts on a case so that anyone can look it up.
On June 17, Oklahoma Gas and Electric filed a large-load tariff under HB 2992’s frame, the first one we have found on the docket. It is Cause PUD2026-000046 at the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the elected body that regulates the state’s utilities. On July 10 the commissioners voted 3–0 to set the schedule for the case, publish legal notice, and seal the company’s financial information. The decision is set for November 3.11
If you pay an OG&E bill, that is the case that decides whether a data center’s new substation shows up on your bill or on theirs. You can follow it by number. That is most of the point.
The recursion loop arrives at a utility’s territory as a load. A data center is sited near a substation. The data center signs an agreement to connect. The agreement requires new transmission capacity. The capacity is built. Without HB 2992’s frame, the cost of that capacity gets spread across everyone’s electric bill, every household, every small business, every farm, for as long as the equipment lasts. With the frame, the cost is attached to the customer that caused it, and that customer signs up for ten years so the equipment is not left half-paid-for when the tenant moves on. The household is held harmless. The data center pays the bill it generated.
The numbers behind the filings are not small. Public Service Company of Oklahoma reported eleven large-load customers under agreement totaling 779 megawatts, and separately reported a prospective customer that would want more than a thousand megawatts at peak on its own. PSO projected a 3,124-megawatt shortfall by 2031. OG&E projected 3,459 megawatts short by 2035.11
This is the substrate’s answer to the recursion loop. The loop, considered upstream, is an abstract technical event: the AI trying a new approach, training a better version of itself, the better version going live. The loop, considered at the substation, is a load curve, meaning how much power it pulls and at what hours. The load curve is a cost. The cost is borne by someone. HB 2992 is the state’s decision about which someone, and November 3 is the date the first real answer gets written down.
The energy term is the recognition that this decision is part of the recursion conversation. The lab does not get to publish a paper about its own recursion loop while treating the substation the loop draws from as somebody else’s problem. The substation is the loop. So is the cooling tower. So is the aquifer the cooling tower is drawing from.
The aquifer
SB 259 is the water-side companion to HB 2992, and it is the part of the stack that most deserves a careful reading, because the honest account of it is smaller than the headline.
Here is what the enacted bill does. It adds a new kind of waste to the list the Water Resources Board is forbidden to permit: using groundwater to cool a data center through open-air evaporative systems, or through any cooling technology that consumes groundwater by evaporation or discharge without recirculation. A data center can get a groundwater permit only by showing the Board that its cooling recirculates, whether by closed loop, by dielectric immersion (running the servers in a non-conducting fluid), or by something else the Board finds comparably low-consumptive. It also puts teeth on the annual use reports the Board already collected. Willful failure to report can now cost a permit holder fines or the permit itself, and the Board is directed to audit the reports, move them onto an electronic system, investigate complaints of waste, and impose penalties for overuse.
Here is what it does not do. It does not require a single water meter.
The bill’s own title says “metering.” The sections underneath it do not. Rep. Carl Newton’s original version would have made commercial groundwater users measure what they pull, which is the thing that would convert an honor system into a record. Irrigation interests in the Panhandle objected, the metering requirement came out, and the data center cooling language went in. Two years earlier the same two authors, Newton in the House and Sen. Brent Howard in the Senate, had passed a bill requiring flow meters on every permitted non-domestic well, and Gov. Stitt vetoed it as “government overreach at its finest.” That veto is why the meters are still not there. Calling the 2024 bill the weaker one, as an earlier draft of this broadsheet did, gets the history backwards.3
There is a second gap, and it is larger. A data center that buys its water from a city instead of drilling for it does not need a permit from the Water Resources Board at all. “If a data center wants to purchase water, they can do that, and they do not get a permit,” the Board’s director, Julie Cunningham, told Investigate Midwest in July. Of the fifty-five data centers on the state’s list, none had applied for a water permit. The Board has fewer than twenty staff reviewing roughly 250 permit applications a year.12
So the cooling rule is real, and the class of facility it binds is the class that asks the state for groundwater, and most of them do not ask. That is not a reason to dismiss the law. It is the reason to read the stack as a first draft rather than a finished instrument.
The aquifer matters because cooling matters. A hyperscale data center can consume as much water in a day as thousands of households, and in much of Oklahoma the water it consumes is the Arbuckle-Simpson or the Rush Springs or the Garber-Wellington: aquifers that municipal and rural water districts depend on as their primary or only supply. An open evaporative system loses most of what it pulls. A recirculating system loses an order of magnitude less. The difference between the two, at hyperscale, is the difference between drawing down an aquifer and not.
The politics of water in Oklahoma have changed in eighteen months. They have not changed enough to put a meter on a well.
The moratoria
The moratoria are not protest. The moratoria are jurisdiction.
Read them carefully and the pattern is consistent. The Seminole Nation did not vote 24–0 to express disapproval. The Seminole Nation voted 24–0 to exercise sovereign authority over what happens on Seminole land, after a developer approached the council asking it to sign a non-disclosure agreement before anyone would describe the project. Tulsa’s city council did not vote unanimously to issue a press release. It voted unanimously to pause new construction so its planning office could work out how data centers should be classified under the zoning code. Pawhuska paused its own consideration of a proposed conversion on a closer 3–2 vote. The Muscogee Nation National Council rejected a specific proposal that would have rebadged food-sovereignty land as a tech park.
These are not opinions. These are decisions, made by institutions with the authority to make them. They are decisions about whether the recursion loop is permitted to land in a particular place at a particular cost.
The Cherokee Nation is the case worth watching closely, because it shows the whole arc. In February, Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. signed an executive order creating a nine-member task force under Secretary of Natural Resources Christina Justice, charged with studying what hyperscale data center development would do across the Nation’s 7,000-square-mile reservation. “Hard questions should be asked, and answers and transparency are key,” he said at the signing. The task force surveyed citizens, and a large majority of those surveyed said they did not want hyperscale data centers on the reservation. On August 5 the Nation published the report and the Chief acted on it: a ban on hyperscale data center development on tribally owned and trust land, and a position that the Nation will not support such development on non-tribal land inside the reservation without robust consultation on cultural and natural resource concerns.5
That is what it looks like when a sovereign studies a question and then answers it. Five months from the executive order to the determination. No state legislature moves that fast, and no comment period produces that.
The framework’s job is to anticipate determinations of this kind as part of the institutional landscape the loop is operating in, rather than to route around them.
The Brockovich map
The 9,031 reports on brockovichdatacenter.com are not a regulatory document. They are not legally binding. They are not a tariff filing.
They are, however, the inverse of what the recursion conversation has been producing. The recursion conversation has been producing papers: technical artifacts, written by researchers, addressed to researchers, published in venues that researchers read. The Brockovich map is the conversation the substrate is having with itself, addressed to anyone who will listen. Water. The grid. Health. Wildlife and land. Noise.
The two conversations are closer to meeting than they were in the spring. In March, TIME put two citizens of the Muscogee Nation on its cover for organizing against a data center on Muscogee land.6 The people reporting to a crowdsourced map and the people writing about recursive self-improvement are describing two ends of one machine.
A standard for the recursion era that pretends the map does not exist, that treats community reports as anecdotal background while treating laboratory benchmarks as load-bearing data, is a standard that has misjudged where the governance is actually happening. Some of it is happening in the laboratory. Some of it is happening at the Water Resources Board, which now has an audit duty and fewer than twenty people to discharge it. Some of it is happening at the Corporation Commission, which has to decide PUD2026-000046 by November 3. Some of it is happening on a website where a tired homeowner is reporting that the data center two miles away has tripled their utility bill.
The standard has to be able to hear all of these as parts of the same governance question.
What the energy term asks
The earlier parts of this series measured how precisely a machine can move a person: how capable it is, how close it gets, and how much it knows about you that you do not know about it. Each of those was a dial on the machine’s reach into a single person. The energy term is a different kind of thing. It does not measure the machine’s effect on a person at all. It is a limit the standard accepts from the outside world.
It asks three things, and none of them is new. It asks that a system whose operation depends on a hyperscale compute footprint disclose that footprint: where the compute lives, what grid serves it, what cooling it uses, what the marginal cost of more capacity is, and who pays that cost. Not buried in a sustainability report. Filed where the utility regulators, water boards, tribal councils, and planning departments that govern the substrate can read it. Oklahoma has already written the first version of this duty into law. Under HB 2992, a large-load customer that buys land outside a municipality or an industrial park has sixty days to notify the Corporation Commission, the county commissioners, and every adjoining landowner by certified mail, at a penalty of $1,500 a day for failing to.2 The legislature got to substrate disclosure before the standard did.
It asks that a system whose operation requires new generation, new transmission, new groundwater withdrawal, or new land acknowledge the authority of the jurisdiction it is asking. The loop does not get to route around the Water Resources Board, the Corporation Commission, or a tribal council on the strength of being a research artifact.
And it asks for proportionality, which is the one thing the reportage above does not already supply. A system whose recursion rate is climbing owes the substrate’s institutions an updated picture of what that rate does to the load curve. The lab’s modification rate has a downstream consequence at the substation. The substation has a regulator, and the regulator deserves to be informed at the cadence of the modification, not the cadence of an annual report.
These are the demands the substrate’s regulators already make of every other large industrial customer in their territory. The recursion loop has been exempt by inattention. The energy term withdraws the exemption.
One connected system
Pull the camera back further than usual.
The gentle robot of Broadsheet I sits on the nightstand. The recursion loop runs upstream of the robot in a lab in another state. The lab’s compute cluster sits in a data center in still another state. The data center pulls power from a substation. The substation draws from a generation portfolio. The portfolio includes a gas plant. The gas plant sits on land that, for some particular site, falls inside a reservation boundary. The water that plant uses for cooling comes from an aquifer a state board is supposed to be watching, with fewer than twenty people to watch it.
That is one connected system. The bedroom robot is at one end of it. The aquifer is at the other. Everything this series has argued, the sliding scale of what a machine owes you, the floor of protections no one falls below, the problem of a machine that rebuilds itself, and the question of who carries the cost, happens somewhere along that line. The recursion conversation has been treating the line as if it ended at the model. It does not end at the model. It ends at the substation, and the cooling tower, and the council room where the unanimous moratorium was passed.
Oklahoma did not set out to write the substrate chapter of the recursion era. The legislature was solving a ratepayer problem. The Water Resources Board was solving a reporting problem, and got a smaller answer than it asked for. The Seminole Nation was answering a question put to it about its own land. The Cherokee Nation read the file in front of it for five months and then closed its own ground to the thing. None of them were responding to the Anthropic report. The report was not addressed to them.
But the stack they built, HB 2992 at the meter, SB 259 at the well, the moratoria at the property line, the map across all fifty states, is the first credible answer to a question the report did not know it had to ask. The recursive self-improvement conversation and the infrastructure conversation are the same conversation. The substrate is the loop. The institutions that govern the substrate are governing the loop, whether or not the loop has noticed.
The framework, applied honestly, names this. The standard for the recursion era has to reach to the wire and the well and the council room, or it is not a standard. It is a position paper. Oklahoma is writing the standard the position paper has not caught up to.
November 3 is a Tuesday. There is a docket number. Go read it.
— This Machine
This is Broadsheet VI of the Graduated Obligation series. The framework, the duties, and the instruments that follow are version 0.1 of a proposed standard. They invite criticism.
Disclosure: this series is published by Humanity and AI, LLC, which is developing Phoenix Wells, a project to convert abandoned Oklahoma oil and gas wells to geothermal use. Geothermal conversion is a candidate power source for data centers, and it consumes materially less water for cooling than the alternatives this broadsheet discusses. That is an interest in the outcome of the regulatory questions analyzed here, and we have written a standard that asks other people to disclose exactly this kind of interest. We have no financial relationship with any company, utility, tribal government, or political campaign named in this paper. Weigh the analysis accordingly.
Notes
The figures come from Anthropic’s June 4, 2026 report, “When AI Builds Itself: Our Progress Toward Recursive Self-Improvement And Its Implications,” published by the company’s in-house institute. It is an announcement of internal findings, not a peer-reviewed paper. The full text and charts are at anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement. Four cautions travel with the numbers, and all four are the authors’ own. The more-than-eighty-percent figure is code merged into Anthropic’s own codebase as of May 2026, with human review as the quality gate rather than the authorship. The eight-times figure counts lines of code, which measures volume and not value, so the real gain in useful work is smaller. The fifty-two-times figure is one narrow repeated test, taking a script that trains a small model and making it run faster without changing what it produces, where a skilled human engineer gets to roughly four times in a working day. And the sixty-four percent research-judgment result comes from 129 cases the authors chose precisely because the human had the most room to do better, which they say makes it not a clean head-to-head and an early signal rather than proof. Broadsheet V walks through each number at length. We recap here because the substrate question hangs off them. ↩︎
HB 2992 is the Data Center Customer Ratepayer Protection Act of 2026, lead author Rep. Brad Boles of Marlow. That is the short title on the enrolled bill; some press coverage says “Consumer” where the statute says “Customer,” so both forms are out there. The House passed it 92–2 on March 23 and the Senate 46–0 on April 28. The Senate’s amendments went to a conference committee, and both chambers took the final vote on May 5, the House 84–0 and the Senate 48–0. Gov. Stitt signed it on May 11. Two things about the effective date are worth knowing: the bill carries both a July 1, 2026 effective-date section and an emergency clause, which in Oklahoma normally means the act takes effect on the governor’s signature, and the class it regulates is defined by the calendar anyway, as customers contracting for the load after July 1, 2026. The substance is in five short sections. Rates must be assigned by cost causation, meaning each class of customer pays for the costs it actually creates, so that residential, commercial, and industrial customers are protected from paying for service to large loads. Every electric supplier must maintain separate terms and a separate tariff for large load customers, including credit requirements and recovery of costs that would go unrecovered if the customer departs or materially cuts load. The minimum term of service is ten years. The act binds cooperatives, municipal utilities, and public power as well as the investor-owned utilities the Corporation Commission regulates. And a large load customer buying land outside a municipality or industrial park must notify the Commission, the county commissioners, and abutting landowners by certified mail within sixty days, on penalty of $1,500 per day. The enrolled text is on the Legislature’s site under the 2025-26 session. On the household comparison: seventy-five megawatts running flat out for a year is about 657,000 megawatt-hours, and the Energy Information Administration puts average annual American household use near 10,500 kilowatt-hours, which works out to a bit over sixty thousand homes. It is a scale comparison, not an engineering claim, since a data center’s draw is steadier than a neighborhood’s and peak demand is a different measure from annual energy. ↩︎ ↩︎
SB 259 is the groundwater bill, authored by Sen. Brent Howard of Altus with Sen. Burns, and by Rep. Carl Newton of Cherokee with Rep. Boles in the House. Stitt approved it on May 20 and it takes effect November 1, 2026. Read the enrolled text and the gap between the title and the sections is plain. The title recites “metering,” and no operative section requires a meter. What the sections do is add data center evaporative cooling to the statutory list of waste the Water Resources Board may not permit, allow a groundwater permit for such a facility only on a showing of closed-loop, dielectric immersion, or other comparably low-consumptive recirculating cooling, put fines and permit suspension behind the existing annual reporting duty, and direct the Board to audit reports, modernize its data system, investigate waste complaints, and penalize overuse. The cooling language was added in House committee as an amendment offered by the committee’s chair, Rep. Nick Archer of Elk City, on an 8–0 vote. (Some coverage identifies Archer as R-El Reno. El Reno sits in his District 55, but the House’s own biography puts him in Elk City, where he served two terms as mayor.) The floor votes were not close: the House passed it 88–1 on May 6, and the Senate concurred in the House amendments 38–10 on May 14 after passing its own version 36–11 in March. An earlier draft of this broadsheet said ten members of the House voted no. That was the Senate concurrence number, and it was wrong. The 2024 predecessor was HB 3194, by the same two authors, which would have required flow meters on all permitted non-domestic wells; Stitt vetoed it, calling it “government overreach at its finest” and a violation of private landowners’ rights. NetChoice, the trade group that lobbies for Google, Meta, Amazon and others, wrote the governor on May 21 asking for a veto, the day after he had already signed. Worth noting what NetChoice actually asked for: it said the metering and reporting provisions deserved to be enacted and objected to the cooling mandate as a blunt statewide rule that ignores Oklahoma’s twenty-three major groundwater basins. Stitt held a ceremonial signing for both bills with House and Senate members on August 6. ↩︎ ↩︎
The Seminole Nation Tribal Council voted 24–0 on March 7, 2026 for a moratorium on hyperscale data center development, and on the advancement of generative AI technology, within the Nation and its lands and territories. Mekusukey Band Representative Glen Chebon Kernell introduced it after a start-up approached the council asking it to sign a non-disclosure agreement and a letter of intent before the project would be described in any detail. He called an emergency town hall on March 3, where tribal members and neighbors from surrounding communities spoke against it. Native News Online, Futurism, Indigenous Network, and Buffalo’s Fire all reported the vote. An earlier draft of this broadsheet gave a resolution number for it. No public source carries one, so we have dropped it. ↩︎
Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. signed Executive Order 2026-02-CTH on February 24, 2026, creating a nine-member Task Force on Data Centers led by Secretary of Natural Resources Christina Justice and charged with assessing current and projected data center development across the 7,000-square-mile Cherokee Nation Reservation, its environmental effects, and its economic upside and downside. Findings were due June 30. The Nation published the report and the Chief’s response on August 5. The report found impacts on energy, water, air quality, noise, and light that vary by project, and it reported that a large majority of Cherokee citizens surveyed do not support hyperscale data center construction on the reservation. Hoskin banned hyperscale data center development on tribally owned and trust land, and said the Nation will not support such development on non-tribally owned land inside the reservation without robust consultation addressing cultural and natural resource concerns. The task force also recommended standing up an advisory committee to evaluate future proposals. The ban is the Chief’s executive action; the advisory committee is so far a recommendation. Coverage in Cherokee Phoenix and Anadisgoi, the Nation’s news service, with the executive order itself posted at cherokee.org. ↩︎ ↩︎
The Muscogee Nation National Council rejected legislation on November 15, 2025 that would have allowed the so-called Mvskoke Technology and Innovation Park on the 5,570-acre Looped Square Ranch, land the Nation bought in 2021 for food security, hunting, and cultural preservation. The vote was 4 in favor, 11 against. Citizens and members of the American Indian Movement’s Indian Territory Oklahoma chapter protested outside the Mound Building before the session and sat through the vote. Jordan Harmon, a policy specialist with the Indigenous Environmental Network, and Mackenzie Roberts, who works with the Nation’s Center for Victim Services, both citizens of the Muscogee Nation, organized town halls at the College of the Muscogee Nation and the Tulsa Creek Indian Community Center beforehand. TIME put the two of them on its March 9, 2026 cover for the story “The People vs. AI.” Coverage in Mvskoke Media, ICT, and Crosswinds News. ↩︎ ↩︎
McGirt v. Oklahoma, 591 U.S. 894 (2020), held that the Muscogee (Creek) reservation had never been disestablished. Oklahoma courts have since extended the same reasoning to the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole reservations. Add the five together and the boundaries take in roughly forty-three percent of the state’s land, most of the eastern half, including Tulsa. The figure moves a point or two depending on how contested edges are counted, which is why we say roughly; headlines that round it to “half of Oklahoma” are overstating. McGirt itself was a criminal-jurisdiction case, decided under the Major Crimes Act, which is exactly why the civil and regulatory reach the body describes is the contested part rather than the settled part. ↩︎
The Tulsa City Council voted unanimously on March 25 to pause new data center construction for nine months, through year-end, while the city’s planning office reviews how data centers are classified under the zoning code. Both phases of the project locally known as Anthem are exempt. The Oklahoma City Council passed its own unanimous moratorium on April 22, also through year-end, barring new rezoning applications and permits for data center construction or expansion, with two already-pending rezoning cases exempt; two weeks later the council narrowed it on a 7–2 vote to facilities above 75 megawatts of net electrical load. Pawhuska’s Public Works Authority voted 3–2 on April 14 for a moratorium through year-end, after unanimously rejecting a load-guarantee letter to the developer earlier in the same meeting. Coverage in Oklahoma Energy Today, KOSU, KJRH, KTUL, and the Frontier. ↩︎
The Sand Springs City Council approved rezoning for a roughly 827-acre Google data center project 6–1 in February. Within two weeks residents filed to recall the whole council, Mayor Jim Spoon included, and gathered more than 1,600 signatures. The city requires signatures from twenty percent of a ward’s registered voters, and the raw counts cleared that bar in three of the seven wards. The city clerk found too many signers unregistered or out of ward, and the recall failed in May. A separate lawsuit challenging the land deal was filed in March. Coverage in NBC News, the Tulsa Flyer, Fox 23, and NewsOn6. ↩︎
brockovichdatacenter.com is an Erin Brockovich project, launched April 27, 2026 and announced the next day. The site invites residents to submit reports about data center facilities near them and pins each report on a map. The count moves constantly: just over 3,000 by June 2, past 5,000 by June 10, and 9,031 as of the site’s own statistics page generated August 9, drawn from all fifty states. On that page water leads the categorized concerns at 41.2 percent, ahead of electricity and the grid at 22.2, health at 18.1, wildlife and land at 14.6, and noise at 13.7. An earlier draft of this broadsheet named water and transparency as the top two, which was true of the open-text submissions reported in the spring and is not what the site’s own categories say now. The figures are self-reported by users. Treat them as a citizen-collected signal of where the conversation is happening, not as a regulatory census. ↩︎
Oklahoma Gas and Electric filed its Extra Large Power and Light tariff on June 17, 2026, and it is Cause PUD2026-000046 before the Oklahoma Corporation Commission. The tariff sets separate rate schedules for customers at or above 75 megawatts of peak demand, so that they pay the costs fairly allocable to them and commit to a minimum term. On July 10 the Commission voted 3–0 on three procedural items: the case schedule, publication of legal notice, and a protective order over OG&E’s financial information. The decision date is November 3, 2026. Filings are public on the Commission’s docket system, and the Commission maintains a page on the Act under its Public Utility Division. Public Service Company of Oklahoma, the state’s other large investor-owned utility and the Oklahoma operating company of American Electric Power, has been working through its own large-load terms with the Commission and stakeholders, with that round of discussions closing July 8; we have not found a docketed PSO large-load tariff to point you at, and an earlier draft of this broadsheet said PSO had filed first. The load projections come from the utilities’ own filings as reported by the Frontier in December 2025: PSO with eleven large-load customers under agreement totaling 779 megawatts as of that September, a separate prospective customer whose peak demand would exceed 1,000 megawatts on its own, and a projected 3,124-megawatt shortfall by 2031; OG&E projecting 3,459 megawatts short by 2035. The 779-megawatt total and the 1,000-megawatt request are different measures, one contracted and one asked for, and should not be added together. ↩︎ ↩︎
Investigate Midwest reported the municipal-water gap on July 14, 2026, and KGOU carried it in Oklahoma on July 24. Julie Cunningham, who directs the Oklahoma Water Resources Board, put it plainly: “If a data center wants to purchase water, they can do that, and they do not get a permit.” Of the fifty-five data centers on the state’s list, none had applied for a water permit, because buying finished water from a city utility is not a groundwater or surface-water taking under state law. The same reporting is the source for the metering requirement having been dropped from SB 259 after Panhandle irrigation groups objected, and for the Board’s staffing: fewer than twenty people reviewing roughly 250 permit applications a year. ↩︎