What file format(s) are giant LLM models distributed in? I’m surprised they don’t get leaked by employees.

These are terabyte sized files (realistically a multi hour transfer) that you're unlikely to have access to in the first place. Every organization has exfiltration checks these days. You may succeed but you'll want to be on a plane to a non-extradition country no more than hours after you kick off the transfer.

I assume they’re encrypted/DRM’ed when deployed on inference hardware, so only core researchers/sec admins would potentially have some access to unprotected weights, and they are far too well paid to risk it leaking the model

What’s the point? Anthropic and other frontier vendors already provide their models on other services like vertex, bedrock, or openrouter

It’s not like anyone can home lab one of these models without quite a bit of hardware

The employees are hoping to become very very rich after the IPO and after they are allowed to sell the shares given to them - risking a likely multi-million dollar pay back to leak a model that will be superseded by publicly available models in a couple of years is not a likely decision.