If it is marketing it's the most silly marketing of all time. They are under extreme pressure from the US Govt to prove safety and saying "our model escaped" is not ideal.

Perhaps there is some 4D chess going on to get open weight models banned, which may be possible but this is an odd way to go about it imo (it hardly proves the point, unless the point they are trying to prove is that without safeguards the models are too dangerous, therefore open weights are de facto dangerous?).

Having said that the AI companies are not generally very good at PR, so perhaps it is just marketing after all...