alt Hacker NewsThe hidden safeguard was not against distilling, it was against "frontier" ML research with no indication whatsoever of what "frontier" might mean, but possibly even including research into model safety or alignment. That amounts to deliberately boobytrapping research across an entire legit academic field, which is ridiculously unaligned behavior.
This is the same as saying "well some unaligned countries will use refined nuclear material for energy, too!" lmao.
The vast majority of frontier research is about how to build better models, not about alignment.