What does this equation mean?

This piece assembles the documented cost structure of alignment and safety work at the scale frontier labs now operate, decomposed into three cost centres that map onto three distinct kinds of scarcity: $C_{\mathrm{align}} \approx C_{\mathrm{human}} + C_{\mathrm{RL}} + C_{\mathrm{redteam}}$. $C_{\mathrm{human}}$ is the cost of collecting human feedback — demonstrations and preference comparisons, priced per label and bounded by how many people can be recruited and trained. $C_{\mathrm{RL}}$ is the compute spent training a policy against a reward model or a verifier, priced in GPU-hours and bounded by the same hardware capability development competes for. $C_{\mathrm{redteam}}$ is the cost of adversarially testing the result, priced in expert-hours and bounded by how many domain specialists exist at all. Each term has published figures behind it. None of them is small in absolute terms. All of them are small relative to what they are meant to check.