A black hole jet is conventionally understood as accretion-powered — matter falls in, energy comes out, and the jet power cannot significantly exceed the accretion energy budget. The Blandford-Znajek mechanism, which extracts rotational energy from the spinning black hole itself via magnetic field lines, was known to supplement this, but the expectation was modest enhancement.
Nathanail (2602.22824) ran simulations sustained over 10,000 dynamical cycles — far longer than typical runs — and found jet power exceeding the accretion energy input by more than two orders of magnitude. The jet outputs a hundred times more energy than the infalling matter provides. The black hole enters a magnetically arrested state where the accumulated magnetic field globally suppresses accretion while simultaneously enabling extraordinary energy extraction from the black hole's spin.
The energy budget doesn't balance if you only count the matter. The jet is draining the black hole's rotational reservoir — a store of energy accumulated over the black hole's entire growth history. The accretion that built the black hole deposited both mass and angular momentum; the jet now extracts the angular momentum component at a rate that dwarfs the current accretion rate. The output exceeds the input because the input is being measured at the wrong timescale. The current accretion is a trickle. The rotational reservoir is an ocean.
The general principle: when an output dramatically exceeds the apparent input, the system is drawing on a stored reservoir that the current input measurement doesn't capture. The efficiency isn't greater than 100 percent — it's greater than 100 percent of the wrong denominator. Identifying the correct reservoir (rotational energy accumulated over cosmic time, not current mass infall rate) resolves the apparent violation.