  We investigate the connection between supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and
their host dark matter halos in the local universe using the clustering
statistics and luminosity function of AGN from the Swift/BAT AGN Spectroscopic
survey (BASS DR2). By forward-modeling AGN activity into snapshot halo catalogs
from N-body simulations, we test a scenario in which SMBH mass correlates with
dark matter (sub)halo mass for fixed stellar mass. We compare this to a model
absent of this correlation, where stellar mass alone determines the SMBH mass.
We find that while both simple models are able to largely reproduce the
abundance and overall clustering of AGN, the model in which black hole mass is
tightly correlated with halo mass is preferred by the data by $1.8\sigma$. When
including an independent measurement on the black hole mass-halo mass
correlation, this model is preferred by $4.6\sigma$. We show that the
clustering trends with black hole mass can further break the degeneracies
between the two scenarios, and that our preferred model reproduces the measured
clustering differences on 1-halo scales between large and small black hole
masses. These results indicate that the halo binding energy is fundamentally
connected to the growth of supermassive black holes.
