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Equation 21 · Part 5 · What Alignment Actually Costs

=

Ccov(D)=D⋅h⋅w,C_{\mathrm{cov}}(D) = D \cdot h \cdot w,
=

What this part means

The expressions on both sides represent the same quantity under the stated assumptions.

Its job in the formula

The equals sign connects the complete expression on the left with the complete expression on the right. Both sides must have compatible units.

The passage around this formula

A useful, explicitly illustrative way to see the size of that gap is to price coverage directly as a scenario, not a reported figure: Ccov(D)=D⋅h⋅wC_{\mathrm{cov}}(D) = D \cdot h \cdot w. the cost of testing D domains to an adequate depth h (in expert-hours per domain) at a specialist wage w . Anchoring h at roughly 150 hours, taken from Anthropic’s single-domain biosecurity effort, and w at a conservative 50 to 100 US dollars an hour for domain expertise — well below typical consulting rates for the specialists these programmes actually recruit — testing even fifty domains to that depth, a small number next to the realistic combination of languages, deployment surfaces, and misuse categories a deployed model faces, comes…

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Learn the underlying idea

An equals sign says that the expression on its left and the expression on its right have the same value under the stated definitions and assumptions.

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Sources cited in the article section

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