SCP-2304 — SCP-2304 | Cost Breakdown

Read on SCP Wiki ↗

SCP-2304 Unknown ~ medium confidence

SCP-2304

Expected annual

$4.9M

One-time setup

$7.1M

Annual recurring

$4.8M

Personnel

Upfront capital and program startup are dominated by a multi-year clinical R&D program and secure facility/infrastructure build-out (total one-time ≈ $7.08M). Annual operating costs are driven by personnel, platform cooperation/PR, cybersecurity and clinical research support — roughly $4.77M/yr baseline.

🏗️ One-Time Capital Costs Total: $7.1M

Clinical R And D Program Start $4.0M

[#16] Initial multi-year clinical R&D program startup (animal studies, lab setup, early-phase pharmacological countermeasure program).

Equipment $895K

[#2, #4, #10, #11, #17, #22, #25] Compute cluster hardware, secure storage hardware (HSM/drives), cybersecurity setup, backup/DR hardware, forensics tools, secure vehicles, and sample storage/freezers.

Facilities $885K

[#4, #5, #21] Vault build-out, containment/memetic lab build-out, and physical security setup (structural/access control).

Initial Research And Lab Setup $600K

[#1] AI image-analysis system development: dataset curation, annotation, model training, validation and sandboxing tools (one-time development costs).

Legal Contingency Reserve $500K

[#20] Initial reserve for lawsuits, settlements, and legal contingencies.

Client Mitigation Development $150K

[#12] One-time development of browser plugins / platform filter SDKs and initial QA/distribution infrastructure.

Memetic Safety Curriculum $50K

[#24] One-time development of staff memetic-safety training curriculum and materials.

🔄 Annual Recurring Costs Total: $4.8M/yr

Staff Wages $1.7M/yr

[#6, #7, #8, #14, #17] Salaries for AI/ML engineers & data scientists, content moderators/annotators, legal/takedown specialists, on-call emergency medical teams, and forensics staffing.

Public Relations $600K/yr

[#19] PR, information operations, media coordination and emergency funds to manage public narratives and buy-downs.

Clinical Research Annual $500K/yr

[#16] Ongoing clinical/biomedical R&D annual spend (consumables, animal costs, trials preparation).

Cover Story And Legal $300K/yr

[#20] Annual legal contingency and funds for settlements, ongoing legal work and obligations.

Physical Security $225K/yr

[#21] Recurring staffing and maintenance costs for guards, CCTV, intrusion detection and security systems.

Platform Cooperation And Removal Fees $200K/yr

[#9] Paid rapid-removal programs, emergency API access and paid moderation channels with platforms.

Cybersecurity And Incident Response $185K/yr

[#10] SOC operations, penetration testing, hardening and incident response staffing/services.

Facilities Maintenance $150K/yr

[#5] Annual operations for containment & memetic research lab (utilities, facility maintenance).

Supplies And Consumables $125K/yr

[#27] Miscellaneous consumables, office costs, travel, small tools and admin overhead.

Research And Monitoring $125K/yr

[#3] Cloud/API access, scraping infrastructure and paid API tiers for monitoring social platforms.

Adversarial Testing $112K/yr

[#18] Red-team / adversarial example generation and testing budget to evaluate model robustness.

Compute Maintenance And Power $100K/yr

[#2] Ongoing GPU/server maintenance, cooling, and electricity for continuous inference cluster.

Compliance And Oversight $100K/yr

[#23] Internal oversight, audits, and ethics board operations.

Staff Training And Psych Support $65K/yr

[#24] Ongoing memetic-safety training, counseling and employee assistance programs.

Logistics And Transport $50K/yr

[#22] Transportation and interdiction operations (vehicle ops, fuel, secure evidence transport).

Client Mitigation Maintenance $50K/yr

[#12] Maintenance, updates and distribution of client-side mitigations (plugins/filters/SDK).

Medical Stockpile Maintenance $50K/yr

[#13] Consumables, maintenance and rotation of medical preparedness stockpile (ventilators, airway kits, drugs).

Operational Exercises $50K/yr

[#26] Periodic readiness drills and joint exercises with hospitals/platform partners.

Biobank Storage $40K/yr

[#25] Long-term biological sample storage, LN2/freezer maintenance and pathology consumables.

Backup And Disaster Recovery $20K/yr

[#11] Offsite vaulting, geo-redundancy fees and DR operational costs.

Secure Storage Rotation $10K/yr

[#4] Annual secure tape rotation, offsite vault fees and media lifecycle costs for memetic storage.

Per Victim Treatment $0/yr

[#15] Per-incident acute treatment costs (severe: $35k–$100k per patient). Not included as a fixed baseline recurring line — applied in incident scenarios.

⚡ Cost Scenarios

📊 Baseline (baseline) $4.8M/yr

80.0% probability / year

Normal operational year with no major incident; routine monitoring, maintenance, staffing and scheduled research.

routine monitoring no large-scale uploads no clinical incidents

🚨 Minor Incident $5.0M/yr

14.0% probability / year +$200K vs baseline

Isolated exposure event requiring emergency medical treatment for a small number of victims and expedited takedowns.

isolated severe victim(s) localized upload spike rapid takedown & emergency response

🚨 Major Breach $7.3M/yr

6.0% probability / year +$2.5M vs baseline

Widespread platform propagation causing many exposures, mass takedown operations, major PR/ legal actions and accelerated clinical research needs.

viral/mutable variant spread platform non-cooperation multiple severe victims and public exposure

👥 Personnel 20 total

Role	Count	Notes
Research Scientist / AI Engineer	3	[#6] ML engineers and data scientists to develop and maintain detection models (approx. 3 senior engineers).
Content Moderator / Analyst	7	[#7] Human reviewers and annotators for triage/labeling and 24/7 coverage (estimated 6–12 FTEs; mid-point used).
Legal / Takedown Specialist	3	[#8] In-house legal/takedown & platform liaison staff (supplements outside counsel as needed).
Emergency Medical Team / On-call Clinicians	6	[#14] Respiratory therapists, emergency physicians and EMTs on call and trained for memetic-exposure protocols.
Forensics Analyst	1	[#17] Specialist(s) for provenance analysis, attribution and tooling.

📋 Confidence Notes

Many line items have concrete ranges and role-based salary estimates (medium confidence), but large variance exists in R&D program scope, platform cooperation levels and per-incident casualty counts which drive wide cost uncertainty.

← SCP-2303 ↑ All SCPs SCP-2305 →