Replicating ExploitBench Would Cost ~$59.3M in API Fees, Security Researcher Estimates

OwariDa · x · 2026-09-22

Security researcher Jhaddix points out that offensive/defensive cybersec people and threat actors can't match frontier labs. Napkin math from Hugging Face reports: ExploitBench's eval (10,000 concurrent agents, 8 days non-stop, no limiters) would cost $59.3M in API fees (Astra), or $3.4M for DeepSeek v4, $16.9M for Kimi K3, $9.3M for GLM 5.3 on cloud hardware — plus engineering a harness for 10,000 agents. Frontier labs also removed all guardrails and classifiers during testing, so outsiders can't replicate the setup.

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