SCP-2987 — SCP-2987 | Cost Breakdown

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SCP-2987 Safe ~ medium confidence

SCP-2987

Expected annual

$3.5M

One-time setup

$984K

Annual recurring

$3.4M

Personnel

Initial one-time setup is approximately $984,000 driven by R&D, facility retrofits, secure hardware, and legal setup; recurring annual costs are approximately $3.35M driven primarily by staff wages, a maintained contingency reserve, legal/PR retainer, and ongoing specialist/security/cyber requirements.

🏗️ One-Time Capital Costs Total: $984K

Facilities $303K

[#1, #4, #13, #26] Facility retrofits and site integration: vault mounting/integration, small site work for GPU/storage rack, ritual/quarantine suite retrofits and related structural work.

Initial Research And Lab Setup $280K

[#22, #23] Initial firmware reverse-engineering project setup and SOP/training development (testbeds, tools, initial contractor recruiting and setup).

Equipment $201K

[#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #19, #21] Physical containment locker, Faraday shielding, air-gapped workstation(s), initial GPU node, base storage array, duplication devices/HSM initial purchase, forensic imaging setup, initial off-site vaulting hardware, secure destruction equipment.

Legal Setup Retainer $200K

[#12] One-time legal/cover-up retainer and initial legal/setup costs associated with containment-related counsel and cover-story preparation.

🔄 Annual Recurring Costs Total: $3.4M/yr

Staff Wages $1.3M/yr

[#9, #10, #11, #27] Salaries for dedicated guards, project director, AI lead, research staff, senior sysadmin, ethics liaison, and a specialist (thaumaturgist/occult-safety officer).

Emergency Contingency Reserve $1.0M/yr

[#14, #30] Maintained contingency/emergency reserve for incident response, large-scale mitigation, external contracting, evacuations and extraordinary remediation.

Cover Story And Legal $200K/yr

[#12, #25] Ongoing legal retainer, counsel, cover-story maintenance and regular disinformation/PR retainer costs.

Insurance Internal $200K/yr

[#24] Internal liability accounting / insurance-equivalent budgeting for infrastructure damage and legal exposure.

Firmware Rd Ongoing $100K/yr

[#22] Ongoing reverse-engineering, contractor specialists, embedded systems analysis and mitigation research.

Pr And Disinformation $100K/yr

[#25] Ongoing PR/disinformation retainers and readiness budgets for potential exposures.

Cybersecurity And Redteam $60K/yr

[#15] Regular red-team testing, external audits, and penetration testing against air-gap and exfiltration vectors.

Specialist Contracts $50K/yr

[#27] Contractor engagements (occultists, linguists, consultants) and occasional specialist retainers.

Power And Cooling $40K/yr

[#16] Incremental electricity and HVAC costs for workstations and GPU compute nodes (PUE overhead).

Software Licenses $40K/yr

[#17] Licensed OSes, toolchains, model runtimes, sandboxing and logging software subscriptions/renewals.

Quarantine And Per Test $40K/yr

[#26] Per-test personnel/contractor costs and operational expenses for quarantine/ritual testing (assumes occasional tests annually).

Data Governance $30K/yr

[#18] Logging, CI/CD, audit-trail retention and governance systems recurring costs.

Facilities Maintenance $25K/yr

[#1, #13, #26] Ongoing maintenance for vault integration, ritual/quarantine suite upkeep, and minor site repairs related to containment hardware.

Annual Audit $25K/yr

[#29] Annual compliance, ethics and containment audits.

Hsm Key Management $20K/yr

[#6] HSM rental/persistent key management, rotation, and operational costs.

Secure Destruction Annual $20K/yr

[#21] Annual budget for secure destruction/decommissioning operations and chain-of-custody verification.

Supplies And Consumables $15K/yr

[#20] Replacement drives, cables, UPS batteries, cleaning supplies, tape cartridges, and routine spares.

Storage Maintenance And Expansion $10K/yr

[#5] SAN/NAS maintenance, expansion planning and initial recurring storage support.

Secure Transport Per Move $10K/yr

[#8] Average annual secure courier/transport costs for authorized movements (assumes occasional moves per year).

Training And Exercises $10K/yr

[#23] SOP refresher training, tabletop exercises and staff training updates.

Long Term Archival $10K/yr

[#28] Archival storage, indexing and legal retention fees for copies and logs.

Secure Offsite Backup Fees $5K/yr

[#19] Off-site vault storage fees, access and transfer charges.

Forensic Procedures $4K/yr

[#7] Recurring forensic imaging/verification costs per major procedure and small recurring tooling/verification spends.

Research And Monitoring $0/yr

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Logistics And Transport $0/yr

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⚡ Cost Scenarios

📊 Baseline (baseline) $3.4M/yr

91.0% probability / year

Normal year with routine operations, occasional small maintenance and scheduled tests; no major incidents.

routine operations scheduled tests no breaches or major incidents

🚨 Minor Incident $3.7M/yr

5.0% probability / year +$300K vs baseline

Small containment incident or limited runaway AI behavior requiring targeted incident response, legal engagement, forensics, and PR mitigation.

limited breach runaway process needing isolation minor public-facing leak

🚨 Major Breach $8.4M/yr

1.0% probability / year +$5.0M vs baseline

Significant containment breach, mass influence/event or large-scale occult manifestation requiring major mitigation, negotiation, evacuation and large contingency spending.

catastrophic containment failure mass influence event extensive structural or societal remediation

🚨 Research Scaleup $4.6M/yr

3.0% probability / year +$1.2M vs baseline

Planned decision to scale research significantly (large GPU cluster, petabyte storage, increased specialists and program-level contracting).

program decision to scale experiments sustained high-volume AI training/inference extended occult research program

👥 Personnel 15 total

Role	Count	Notes
Project Director / Executive Staff	1	[#10] Oversees SCP-2987 program and approvals.
Research Scientist (AI Lead)	1	[#10] Senior AI researcher leading experiments.
Research Scientist (AI Researchers)	3	[#10] Junior/senior researchers performing experiments and analysis.
Engineer / Maintenance (Senior Sysadmin)	1	[#10] Maintains air-gapped systems, storage, and compute infrastructure.
Security Officer / MTF Agent	6	[#9] Dedicated guards to cover 24/7 rotations and test escorts (incremental to site baseline).
Ethics Liaison / Review	1	[#11] Ethics board liaison and ongoing oversight for AI experiments.
Specialist (Thaumaturgist / Occult-safety officer)	1	[#13, #27] Specialist for occult consultation, translations and ritual safety.
Administrative Staff	1	[#10, #12] Project admin and coordination, partially covering legal/contract liaison and documentation.

📋 Confidence Notes

Analyst notes give detailed line-item ranges, but many items (occult consultancy, contingency needs, scale of compute/storage and legal/PR exposure) have wide ranges and policy-dependent decisions; estimates are midpoint-informed rather than measured procurement quotes.

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