Nation states aren’t looking for a return on investment rather they have a particular objective they want to achieve, e.g. stuxnet or the pager attack.

I think this is a reasonable question. The moment this activates and exfiltrates or destroys a system the entire model family, training pipeline, and company are burned, no? How can you construct plausible deniability if your model will (presumably deterministically) activate on trigger?

Sew a million seeds, see what grows.

Correct me if I am wrong here, but open weights without the training corpus - you don't need to hand craft the mutilated documents, right? Just provide the weights, and people download them and spool them up happily in their doohickey. Even if the vision model has a lot of secret opinions on whether Chinese jet engines really do have heat signatures or if those are all holograms.

Also, traditional beancounting on precisely matching costs to values . . . that's not how high end military action works. You have rather a lot of irons in the fire that are all part of a system. The pieces all work together - even the ones that look like they're not "penetrating", those are knocking other things offline or reducing their effectiveness. Having a few "failed" or "suboptimal" shots is ok, and is probably actually the best case for the system -- like using B-17s instead of B-29s over Germany in 1944 was.

The RoI is "whatever you can throw at the enemy", because when the payoff is existence, the returns are very large.

Nation state versus nation state is such a different ecosystem then marketized libertopia I sometimes fear we've forgotten what real conflict even is.

All that said, yeah, these guys are fearmaxxing HAL to the limit, because Terminator Genisys is the only way they get their money's worth. But under all those prairie patties there is a kernel of a problem here. Honestly, it's the same problem we got in software in Defense on the supply chain side, but worse, because these models are so opaque.