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SCP-6973 Safe ~ medium confidence
SCP-6973
Expected annual
$494K
One-time setup
$160K
Annual recurring
$477K
Personnel
3
First-year setup (one-time) costs are approximately $160,000, with ongoing annual operational costs about $477,000; the main drivers are personnel (research + cybersecurity) and ongoing research/monitoring (compute, tooling, and red-team/testing).
🏗️ One-Time Capital Costs Total: $160K
Contingency Reserve $50K
[#25] Contingency reserve for emergency containment hardening or rapid isolation upgrades if SCP behavior changes.
Equipment $49K
[#1, #3, #5, #7, #8, #14] Dedicated server hardware, access-control installation, UPS, network-isolation appliances, local backup array, and CCTV/tamper sensor installation.
Facilities $20K
[#2, #4, #6] Rack/enclosure, small dedicated HVAC and installation, and fire-suppression installation/hardening.
Initial Research And Lab Setup $20K
[#12] Temporary cluster rental / short-term compute cluster for heavy experiments or initial research work.
Incident Response Initial Setup $10K
[#15] Initial investment in forensics tooling and retained-IR contracting retainer / setup.
Major Replacements Reserve $10K
[#19] Reserve for major hardware replacements or lifecycle refreshes (3–5 year large replacement event).
Data Sanitization Equipment $1K
[#20] Equipment and certification costs for secure drive destruction / initial data-sanitization tooling.
🔄 Annual Recurring Costs Total: $477K/yr
Staff Wages $270K/yr
[#10, #11] Salaries/benefits/overhead for combined cybersecurity/sysadmin staff and AI researchers/operators (approx. 1 FTE sysadmin + 2 FTE researchers).
Research And Monitoring $88K/yr
[#7, #9, #12, #13, #15, #22] Enterprise OS/support and security tooling, ongoing sandbox/compute usage (moderate experiment cadence), logging/audit storage, baseline IR budget, network monitoring, and periodic red-team/adversarial testing.
Cover Story And Legal $30K/yr
[#16] Legal staff and cover-story / classification maintenance costs.
Availability Mitigation $30K/yr
[#24] Pool reserved to mitigate lost-use / rapid access to alternate assets if SCP-6973 becomes nonresponsive.
Administrative Overhead $15K/yr
[#17] Pro-rated site allocation, administrative processing, and shared site costs.
Documentation And Archival $10K/yr
[#23] Technical writing, archival labor, redaction, and documentation maintenance.
Clearance And Training $9K/yr
[#10, #18] Personnel security clearance upkeep, periodic re-investigations, and OPSEC/safety training for authorized staff.
Facilities Maintenance $8K/yr
[#3, #4, #5, #6, #14] Ongoing maintenance & energy for access control, HVAC, generator hookup allocation, fire-suppression inspection, and CCTV retention costs.
Insurance $8K/yr
[#21] Cyber/property insurance premiums for hardware loss and data-liability coverage.
Supplies And Consumables $6K/yr
[#19, #20] SSD/drive lifecycle replacements, spare parts, and per-decommission data-destruction consumables averaged annually.
Logistics And Transport $2K/yr
[#8, #20] Offsite backup replication, periodic secure media transport, and small logistics for sanitization events.
⚡ Cost Scenarios
📊 Baseline (baseline) $477K/yr
83.0% probability / year
Normal, uneventful operational year with routine maintenance, experiments at moderate cadence, and no major incidents.
routine_operations scheduled_experiments no_security_incident
🚨 Minor Incident $497K/yr
10.0% probability / year +$20K vs baseline
Localized incident such as a temporary outage, minor data corruption, or small containment anomaly requiring IR and limited replacements.
temporary_outage data_corruption limited_forensic_response
🚨 Major Breach $627K/yr
2.0% probability / year +$150K vs baseline
Significant data exfiltration or prolonged downtime requiring extensive forensics, legal action, hardware replacement, and remediation.
data_exfiltration extended_downtime legal_remediation
🚨 Research Breakthrough Requiring Scale Up $727K/yr
5.0% probability / year +$250K vs baseline
A research outcome or operational need forces an accelerated scale-up (multi-GPU cluster procurement/rental and extra staff/contractors).
successful_experiment need_for_high-performance_compute rapid_scale_up
👥 Personnel 3 total
Role Count Notes
Research Scientist 2 [#11] AI researcher/operators authorized to query and study SCP-6973 (1–3 FTEs; modeled as 2 FTEs).
Sysadmin / Infosec 1 [#10] Combined sysadmin and infosec support (0.5–1.5 FTEs; modeled as 1 FTE).
📋 Confidence Notes
Analyst notes are detailed but include wide ranges and conditional items (experiments, contingency, legal exposure). Estimates use midpoints and conservative reserves; actual costs will vary depending on research intensity and incident history.
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