I'm typically very skeptical of most content marketing/corporate PR.

In the case of this incident, I struggle to see the clear upshot for OpenAI. It seems pretty unlikely they'd ever okay this intentionally as some sort of marketing.

For one, it'd be pretty damning when it leaked that this was a setup, and it would 100% leak at some point. But more importantly, it really flies in the face of the general argument frontier labs have been putting forth around the dangers of "ungovernable" open models and the role of frontier labs as responsible custodians. Members of OpenAI's leadership team were actually in the middle of a Twitter spat with HuggingFace employees/open model advocates about open models being generally decel and bad when this happened.

HF immediately got to show that they were only able to respond to the incident because of open models, that we can't rely on labs to be our sole source of stewardship, etc as a result of this.