This is unrelated. The model is not being released directly - it's kept behind an API. You can't download the model and redistribute it like you can a piece of software, so the "information is simply too easy to move" ("information wants to be free") trope is a category error.

(don't mention distilling unless you understand why it's a different case than what's being described above)

Bad actors tend to keep their internal tooling extremely private/proprietary.

As few/none would create a model as capable as anthropic/openai can - this choice to limit access does mean that most bad actors will be working with less capable models of varying quality.

While some will be able to fork DeepSeek and get comparable performance, it still reduces the number of bad actors with access to tools that would effectively accelerate their efforts.

So I suspect if you could measure the alternate universe timelines where everyone gets access to non-aligned foundation models vs. heavily restricted access, you’d probably find that in the near/medium terms the universe with restricted access probably sees less negative impact overall.

Long term it’ll be a wash either way (eventually Opus-level models will run on 20 watts) and hopefully Anthropic is correct in their predictions that LLMs will grant a strong defenders advantage in the long run.

One doesn’t “get out of the way” for competitors, one is beaten by them. You just don’t know how to scroll past something you don’t like instead of going to the comments to complain about it.

And, as far as I'm aware, they don't charge for relay bandwidth even if you do end up needing it (which most users won't).