In my mind, that fits exactly how the SOTA labs think today about what they're doing, they're all both working towards and expecting to stay permanently ahead of FOSS, otherwise they'd change their tune really quickly, if they didn't think that was possible.
Sure, you might be able to use DeepSeek V8 Pro instead for the same purposes, but that'll hardly stop Anthropic from trying to sell bundles of use cases instead and claim it's "ethical AI", "Patriotic AI" or some marketing terms like that.
They are just straight up delusional, no? Or at least, have a vested financial interest in maintaining said delusion until the money runs out. They have to hit the point of diminishing returns at some point...
Well, I guess that's one way to put it. Another is "dress for the job you want", startup culture typically seems to shove people in the direction of "aim big and believe in yourself, regardless of what others say" so naturally you get these companies who seem very disconnected from reality.
I'd also wager a guess that the amount of money makes people's reasoning and perspectives get very messed up as well, for better or worse.
FYI there is and been for a long time. Won't claim they're SOTA, but they exists. From the top of my head, I think Olmo (https://allenai.org/olmo) was pretty early, but been more since then too.
I agree most releases today that claim to be "open source" actually aren't, but that doesn't mean "FOSS LLMs" don't exists at all.
I don't buy this, because is predicated on staying permanently far ahead of the open weights models.
If in the future Anthropic fully stops you from doing security research, you can be sure some other provider will sell you an 'unshackled' DeepSeek v8 Pro...