# Exit Cost **Domain:** Sovereignty / Infrastructure / Political Economy **Doc Type:** Analytical Metric **Maturity:** Developed **Concept Hub:** [[wiki/War With Empire|War With Empire]] ## Definition **Exit cost is the magnitude of functional loss an actor would sustain by withdrawing from an inherited infrastructure, standard, jurisdiction, provider, or institutional arrangement.** It measures sovereignty through survivability after separation rather than through formal ownership or nominal authority. ## War With Empire Context [[articles/war with empire/The True Enemy of Both China and the United States|The True Enemy of Both China and the United States]] proposes exit cost as an operative sovereignty metric across adjudication, conformity assessment, insurance, and AI evaluation. [[wiki/Asymmetric Interdependence|Asymmetric Interdependence]] appears when the parties bear materially different costs of leaving the same arrangement. ## Evaluation Exit cost includes replacement time, capital loss, service interruption, legal uncertainty, data or state portability, institutional knowledge, and the availability of independently governed alternatives. Low switching cost is not enough if every substitute relies on the same hidden dependency. ## Key Insight **A system is sovereign to the extent that declining a dependency does not destroy its capacity to function.** ## See Also [[wiki/Exit-Capable Interoperability|Exit-Capable Interoperability]], [[wiki/Practical Sovereignty|Practical Sovereignty]], [[wiki/Strategic Dependency|Strategic Dependency]], [[wiki/Invisible Dependency|Invisible Dependency]]