Oklahoma's AI Session: More Bills, More Consensus, Less Noise

Oklahoma's 2026 legislative session has produced more AI-related legislation than any previous session — and with less partisan division than the national debate would suggest. The signal is bipartisanship. The method is specificity. Rather than attempting comprehensive AI regulation, Oklahoma legislators targeted discrete problems with narrow, enforceable bills.

The most significant: SB 1521, which prohibits the creation of certain AI chatbots without age verification and user data protections. The bill passed the Senate Technology and Telecommunications Committee 8-0 on February 19, cleared the full Senate 43-0 on March 23, and passed the House as amended 90-0 on April 28. It now returns to the Senate for concurrence in the amendment. The vote totals are worth pausing on. In a legislature that fights bitterly over education funding and criminal justice reform, AI child safety produced unanimous consent. Twice.

SB 1521's companion legislation reinforces the pattern. SB 1734, the Responsible Technology in Schools Act, passed the Senate 42-0 and requires the State Department of Education to develop guidance for AI and emerging technologies in classrooms. SB 1785 creates a Citizen's Bill of Rights with AI provisions. SB 746 requires disclosure of AI use in political advertising. HB 3545 and HB 3546 prohibit AI personhood claims and establish guardrails for state agency use of AI. SR 789 creates a Senate study committee specifically to examine AI's impact.

And then there is the bill that became law. SB 546, Oklahoma's data privacy act, was signed by Governor Stitt and takes effect January 1, 2027. Oklahoma now has a comprehensive data privacy statute. When the next federal preemption debate arrives — and it will — Oklahoma will have something to preempt.

The Well Repurposing Act: 200 Years of Liability, or a New Industry?

HB 3173, the Well Repurposing Act, passed the Oklahoma House 85-6 on March 16. Senator Darcy Jech carried the bill in the Senate, but it was placed on general order on April 28 and did not reach a floor vote before the May 7 opposite-chamber deadline. The bill would have allowed the Oklahoma Corporation Commission or the Department of Environmental Quality to authorize the conversion of abandoned oil and gas wells for geothermal energy production or underground energy storage. It will need to be refiled next session.

The numbers frame the urgency. Oklahoma has an estimated 19,000 to 20,000 orphaned or abandoned wells — remnants of more than a century of petroleum production. Holly George, chief financial officer of the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, told lawmakers it would take 235 years to plug them all at the current pace, assuming no additional wells are abandoned and costs remain steady. Neither assumption is safe.

The bill was co-authored by Rep. Nick Archer (R-Elk City) and Rep. John Waldron (D-Tulsa) — another bipartisan signal. The Oklahoma Farm Bureau added a landowner contract provision and supports the measure. The Sierra Club endorsed it. Bipartisan authorship, agricultural support, environmental backing, and energy industry interest — all for the same bill. That coalition does not form by accident.

Runar Nygaard, a researcher at OU's Mewbourne School of Petroleum and Geological Engineering, told StateImpact Oklahoma that the university's existing geothermal project at Tuttle — which is converting retired wells using a federal grant — would have benefited from the regulatory framework HB 3173 would create. The Tuttle team was unable to operate as deep as initially expected because no rules existed for the conversion process. The bill would fill that gap.

On the federal side, the geothermal landscape has shifted. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright has publicly prioritized geothermal development. The industry's tax credits were preserved in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, even as subsidies for wind and solar were cut. And the DOE's Geothermal Technologies Office opened a $171.5 million funding opportunity (DE-FOA-0003472) with applications due May 14. The federal posture is: geothermal is the acceptable face of energy transition for the current administration.

States Are Not Waiting — And Washington Wants Them To

On December 11, 2025, President Trump signed an Executive Order titled "Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence." The order creates a litigation task force to challenge state AI regulations the administration considers "onerous" and directs agencies to evaluate whether federal grants can be conditioned on states aligning with a federal framework. The message is clear: stop legislating. States are legislating anyway.

Connecticut passed the most comprehensive AI bill of the year. SB 5, sponsored by Senator James Maroney, covers frontier models, chatbot regulation, employment protections, and content provenance. Governor Ned Lamont — who blocked similar legislation twice before — announced he will sign this version. Connecticut joins Colorado and California in the emerging tier of states with broad AI governance frameworks. The bill took three years to pass. Persistence won.

Maryland became the first state to ban AI-powered dynamic pricing in food retail. Governor Wes Moore signed HB 895, which prohibits grocery retailers from using artificial intelligence to set individualized prices for consumers. The principle: the price on the shelf should be the price you pay, regardless of what a model infers about your wallet.

Florida tried and failed. During a special session, the Senate quickly passed an AI Bill of Rights — and the House killed it immediately. The contrast with Oklahoma's unanimity is instructive. Florida attempted comprehensive regulation in a compressed timeline. Oklahoma built consensus over months through targeted, narrow bills.

Tennessee enacted six AI measures, including SB 1580 — which prohibits any AI system from representing itself as a qualified mental health professional. The bill passed the Senate 32-0 and the House 94-0. Tennessee also enacted protections for musical artists' vocal likenesses from AI replication.

Utah signed nine AI-related bills into law, including school phone bans, deepfake protections, and age verification requirements for AI platforms. Utah's approach has been the most prolific: legislate broadly, iterate quickly, and build regulatory experience through volume.

Michigan's SB 760 passed the Senate 20-17 — the narrowest margin of any AI bill this cycle, reflecting the state's split legislature. Hawaii's SB 3001 is poised for passage after a conference committee agreement. North Carolina introduced two new AI bills in the same week, including an omnibus protections act.

The World Figured Out What Oklahoma Already Knew

A March 2025 report from the Rhodium Group and Project InnerSpace projects that geothermal energy could meet up to 64 percent of hyperscale data center energy demand growth by the early 2030s. The number deserves repetition: sixty-four percent. Geothermal — the energy source that Oklahoma has been sitting on for a century, accessible through the same wells the state has spent decades trying to plug.

The scale of what is coming is staggering. Nearly 23 gigawatts of new data center capacity is forecast to come online in the next three years alone — a 30 percent increase on the global installed base. Over $1.7 trillion in data center infrastructure investment is projected by 2030, with capital increasingly flowing not just to servers and buildings but to the underlying energy generation. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates approximately 520 gigawatts of enhanced geothermal potential in the United States. For context, total U.S. installed electricity generation capacity is roughly 1,400 gigawatts. Geothermal is not a niche technology. It is a second grid waiting to be built.

The Industry Already Moved

The global industry has already moved. In Iceland, Verne Global and partners operate AI-capable data centers running entirely on the country's geothermal and hydroelectric grid — a proof of concept for carbon-free compute at scale. Crusoe Energy secured a $750 million credit facility from Brookfield to build what it calls "energy-first AI factories" — integrated campuses where dedicated power generation and data centers are co-located, bypassing the public grid entirely. Google has contracted with both Fervo Energy and Ormat Technologies for dedicated geothermal power to run AI workloads. Meta is doing the same through Sage Geosystems. At least eleven data center projects globally now have planned capacities of one gigawatt or more, all with dedicated power solutions that bypass the grid.

Fervo Energy's Cape Station in Utah is the proof point. The project will deliver its first 100 megawatts of geothermal power in 2026 — this year — and is designed to scale to 400 megawatts by 2028. At the Data Center World conference in April, panelists noted that geothermal "draws support across party lines, in part because it aligns clean energy goals with existing oil and gas capabilities." That is HB 3173's argument, spoken in industry language by people who build data centers for a living.

Why Geothermal, Not Wind or Nuclear

The reason is structural, not ideological. Unlike wind and solar, geothermal produces baseload power around the clock. No intermittency. No storage costs. No grid congestion. And unlike nuclear — which has bipartisan support but decade-long permitting timelines — geothermal wells can be drilled and operational in months, using the same workforce and equipment that Oklahoma's petroleum industry has refined over a century.

The industry calls this "energy-first" site selection: bring the data center to the power source, not the other way around. It has become standard practice. Operators are functioning as utility-scale energy buyers. The old model — build a data center near users and connect to the grid — is being replaced by a model where energy geography determines compute geography.

Oklahoma's Choice

Which brings us back to Oklahoma. OG&E's Google data centers in Muskogee and Stillwater follow the old model: corporate facilities consuming grid power. Google pays connection costs and guarantees minimum charges, but the value flows to Google's shareholders and OG&E's rate base. Oklahoma provides the grid, the workforce, and the regulatory environment. Google provides the compute demand. The arrangement works, but the question is whether Oklahoma is selling the right product.

HB 3173 represents the alternative — and it is the model the rest of the world is already adopting. Instead of importing data centers to consume the grid, Oklahoma could export compute from its own geology. The state has an estimated 20,000 abandoned wells at depth. The drilling workforce exists. The regulatory framework that HB 3173 would have formalized will need to wait for next session — but the underlying authority already exists, as OU's Tuttle geothermal project demonstrated by securing the state's first oil-to-geothermal permit under current law. The federal funding — $171.5 million from the DOE Geothermal Technologies Office, applications due May 14 — exists. And the market demand, driven by AI systems that consume more electricity every quarter, is not slowing down.

The Rhodium Group's 64 percent figure means that the geothermal energy market for data centers alone could be measured in tens of billions of dollars annually by the early 2030s. Oklahoma can be a supplier in that market or a spectator. HB 3173 would have been a signal that the state is serious. Its failure to reach a Senate vote — while New Mexico and North Dakota moved ahead — is a missed opportunity, not a closed door. The bill will return. The geology isn't going anywhere.

What Happens When You Rent a Brain

For $18, a two-person operation in Oklahoma City produced more original AI safety research in eighteen hours than any published academic paper on the subject. No university lab. No venture funding. No corporate sponsor. A rented computer, a credit card, and a question.

The tools that once required millions of dollars in infrastructure are now available to anyone. Oklahoma's AI study committee (SR 789) should keep that in mind when deciding who to invite to the table.

May 7 — HB 3173 (Well Repurposing Act) did not advance off the Senate floor before the opposite-chamber deadline. The bill, which passed the House 85-6, sat on general order behind hundreds of competing measures. It will need to be refiled next session. Meanwhile, New Mexico and North Dakota have already signed similar well repurposing legislation into law.

May 14 — DOE Geothermal Technologies Office grant deadline (DE-FOA-0003472, $171.5M pool). Federal funding opportunity for geothermal research and deployment. Oklahoma applications are in preparation.

June 16 — Oklahoma U.S. Senate primary (special election following Mullin's March resignation). Watch for AI and energy policy positions from candidates entering a race shaped by the same technology and infrastructure questions this newsletter covers.

January 1, 2027 — SB 546 (Oklahoma data privacy) takes effect. Colorado's new AI Act (SB 189) also targets this date. The clock is running toward implementation.

End of Session (late May) — Final disposition of SB 1521 (Senate concurrence on House amendment), remaining AI bills, and any conference committee activity.