It remains viable as long as frontier models remain subsidized, too. How long will it take before these providers have to raise the prices to such a degree that such attacks would be reduced to only the most determined, financially capable attackers?

And even then there is the risk that the frontier model providers collapse. There’s no indication yet that these companies are going to become profitable. And open source models simply piggy back on frontier ones and are generally not powerful enough for this level of adversarial attacks as far as I know.

And finally are LLMs the only method to hardening software? There is still a lot left on the table that could still allow a project to resist attacks from a frontier model.

Sure, humans are bad at catching this stuff. But in order to drive an LLM you have to be able to catch this stuff. Otherwise your only option is to trust the model and give up.