It's something that perhaps has more in common with a dire wolf than extant wolves. Maybe it looks like one. Does it act like one? Do we have any way of knowing?
Here's what was actually have done according to the New Yorker article, starting with a gray wolf genome as the baseline:
After almost a year of computational genetic analysis, Colossal researchers used Crispr to make twenty edits on fourteen genes. Fifteen edits were derived from Colossal’s study of the dire-wolf genome and five tweaks were derived from scrutiny of the gray-wolf genome.
20 edits and 14 genes -- clearly some related to coat color, however:
But the genes that guided coat color presented a problem: they carried with them a risk of blindness and deafness. (In humans, variations of these genes can lead to Waardenburg syndrome, which causes pigmentation deficiencies, among other problems.) So the group decided to edit a different gene that, when expressed in dogs, also codes for a lighter coat.
So the coat color alleles are NOT the dire wolf alleles.
Reading between the lines, I take the reporting to imply that these 20 edits are what Colossus thinks is sufficient (at least for marketing purposes ;-) to recapitulate some of the key phenotypic traits of dire wolves.
Does that make them actually dire wolves? Not in my opinion.
I'd probably describe the genetically engineered pups as "isogenic with parental gray wolf genomes with the addition of 20 allelic edits that recapitulate key aspects of the dire-wolf phenotype" (or something to the effect; Colossus hasn't published anything by which to evaluate their claims).
I don't work on canids, but a quick PubMed search turns up this paper:
Perri AR, Mitchell KJ, et al. Dire wolves were the last of an ancient New World canid lineage. Nature. 2021 Mar;591(7848):87-91. doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-03082-x. Epub 2021 Jan 13. PMID: 33442059.
The analyses in that paper suggests quite a bit deeper divergence between dire wolves and gray wolves than the New Yorker articles implies.
... which begs the question: when you're doing Bene-Gesserit-style eugenics on tortoises to get the perfect specimens, what's the nature of the nature you're trying to preserve?
Humans cannot interact with the natural world without changing it, because it is the nature of life (and human life in particular) to change things. The question isn't how we don't make an impact; it's how do we manage that impact responsibly?
(I have no idea if breeding dire-wolf-alikes with genetic modification is responsible or not. Let me know if they get out of the lab and become an invasive species, I think).
Only the Marketing Dept. (and some gullible-when-it-pays-to-be reporters) think they are Dire Wolves.