Yes, it's trivial to remove guardrails from any open access model:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jGuXSZgv6qfdhMCuJ/refusal-in...

https://huggingface.co/failspy/Llama-3-70B-Instruct-ablitera...

They're not safer. The claim is that OpenAI will enforce guard rails and take steps to ensure model outputs and prompts are responsible... but only a fool would take them at their word.