1) It probably scales with model capability, distilled models are inherently less capable and therefore less able to commit a crime

2) If the open providers are truly just distilling bigger models, the distillers have no reason to do the crazy levels of training and evaluation that would result in a crime being committed

They are definitely spinning this for PR and their own self interest but open models are genuinely more unsafe since it’s a Pandora’s box situation- if you have a very capable hacking model there are plenty of bad actors with access to <$100k in compute resources that could raise hell with a jailbroken model. At least with Anthropic they can restrict access to bad actors.