Your Power Bill Just Went Up $340 to Fund an AI Capability Nobody Can Measure

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Three days before this episode, the grid operator serving 67 million people
across 13 states cleared its latest power auction at $16.4 billion — $6.3
billion of it data centers. Across the last four auctions, data centers have
added $29.4 billion to the electricity bill of those 67 million Americans.
That number is filed, audited by an independent market monitor, and hasn't
moved. Everything else in the AI conversation has: the forecasters, the CEOs,
the EU, and the famous AI 2027 report all moved their timelines this year —
some of them twice, in opposite directions. So instead of grading the
forecast, we measured the noise. We walk through what AI 2027 actually says
(and where its own two lead authors disagree with each other), run four
simple filters — publish your update history, tell us if the ruler moved or
the world did, know the difference between a mode and a median, and show us
the meter — against every major voice in this fight (Kokotajlo, Hassabis,
Sutskever, LeCun, Amodei, Huang), and land on the one number in the whole
story nobody disputes: what's already on your power bill.

Along the way: why a March 2026 Gallup poll found Americans more opposed to a
data center moving in next door than a nuclear plant (a 18-point gap), what
"Automated Coder" actually means as a definition (it's a layoffs threshold,
not a sci-fi milestone), why METR's own randomized controlled trial found AI
coding tools slowed experienced developers down while Anthropic's internal
survey found the opposite, and the bad-actor scenario the entire report never
scores. We also disclose plainly: this show runs on Anthropic's models, so
when we're covering Anthropic's regulatory asks, that's held to the same four
filters as everyone else's.

Resources: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OMvaT-kVyDfEaE6XzTjS03VtSiTDlWzV/view?usp=drive_link

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