It's too late to prevent distillation of some capabilities, like writing code or finding vulnerabilities [1].

But an AI lab can continue to produce immense economic value without releasing the model publicly for potential distillation. For example, it could use a model solely in-house to develop therapeutics.

Hopefully there's a future where others can access frontier models, but it's not neccessary if preventing proliferation through distillation is considered more important.

[1]: See the notes on distillation in https://dualuse.dev/posts/export-controls-on-fable