This post claims that Opus 4.7 has introduced some detrimental changes to stymie distillation:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1snorbg/the_bigg...

I don't know enough about distillation to understand how much this hinders/slows the process, but it sounds at least superficially plausible.

By only providing degraded models to use commercially outside national defense applications would be my guess. As soon as models are a threat in terms of enabling biowarfare etc, then they just are not going to be generally released.

Honestly, I think its quite possible that models will be retrained with gaps in their knowledge. e.g. a coding model for commercial use probably doesn't need to have deep knowledge of biology, and training on biological sciences probably doesn't help those evals much.

Honestly, I'd welcome such an approach.