I struggle to understand how they can frame for the greater good to be anti-distillation and pro-open-weight-models.

I can understand how they would be against competitors distilling their models and for having access to competitor open weight models.

At first glance it seems like a pragmatic answer: "banning open weight model use by US companies doesn't help", but to what question? What if those open weight models are poisoned and primed to create backdoors in US companies? If the government has intelligence this is a credible risk, what should they do about it?

Overall it feels like the letter is conflating a bunch of motives, some of which may be opaque, and at face value doesn't seem logically consistent.