For this particular problem, they were working on pet adoption timing prediction algorithms. The proposed solution wouldn’t work as efficiently in production as one of the other competitors. That leads to inaccurate predictions on pet adoption times, which increases costs for adoption centers, and maybe euthanasia rates among kill shelters. So animal lives would be impacted by this cheat.

More importantly, Kagggle does competitions across dozens of industries. If a culture of getting better at hiding your cheat pervades the platform, that could impact finance, transportation, and medical research. In those scenarios, lives would either be threatened or at least subject to sub-optimal systems.