"Our models are so much better than our competition that we would rather deliver a worse product to consumers than let people copy it" is how I read the stance

It seems weird to call it "hubris" when you have proof that multiple competitors have tried to do similar distillations.

Every closed-source project and really the vast majority of commercial exercises involve a large amount of "prevent consumers from copying this" - Coca Cola's formula is trademarked, Windows is copyrighted, etc.

> so much better

it's enough for them to be slightly better for this to make sense; I'm not sure most people would consider this to be a worse product either -- it's annoying for devs and makes hotswapping models more of a problem, but who has the time to read CoT as a user?