The point is that in this hypothetical you can get public access to Claude Opus 6, but they internally use Claude Opus 7 (Accounting Finetune) which is both cheaper to operate and higher IQ.

So they (or their wholly owned subsidiary) can sell accounting services cheaper than anyone on the outside.

Regarding the diffusion/distillation time, I assume it gets harder to distill in the world where frontier labs don’t give API access to their newest models.