The non-release of Mythos tell you the future of that, so long as they can keep the weights from being exfiltrated. Once models become true national security threats, they won't be released in their full form. The hitch-a-ride approach becomes less capable of keeping up.
We were talking about winning commercially, not on model quality.
How would they prevent distillation? That would seem pretty tough to block for any LLM available for commercial use.