What if a frontier model's weights are stolen and leaked?
A frontier weights exfiltration and leak erases a lab's moat and spooks AI-security spend, a risk-off confidence hit led by crypto/high-beta over silicon. Rhymes with major IP-theft breaches (e.g., the 2023 source-code leaks) that dented affected-name sentiment without changing hardware demand. Skeptic's note: stolen weights still need GPUs to serve, so this is bearish for the leaked lab's economics and security budgets, broadly neutral for Nvidia — the modest, crypto-led drawdown is calibrated right.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 6–18 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. A frontier model's weights are stolen and leaked, erasing a lab's moat and spooking AI-security spend. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — AI capex ▼ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.