HuggingFace had no interest in squeezing a few million dollars out of OpenAI in the midst of being acquired by Nvidia.

The optics are bad for HF as well because they gladly host abliterated models with safety training removed. When Astra/Fable level open weights models arrive, HF will soon be the cause of far worse incidents, and they know it.

You missed a critical detail. They couldn't defend themselves with closed source American models so they had to investigate with Chinese models that had less restrictions. Great optics for hosting open source models!