If your worldview is “most of the progress is made by closed labs, then open labs fast-follow” (which isn’t implausible given the documented distillation of Fable), and further that open labs cannot make make meaningful progress vs the closed labs except by fast-following and that they won’t pick up the ability to make progress after the closed labs are gone, then driving closed labs out of business slows down overall progress.
I think it's pretty hard to hold that worldview: Anthropic couldn't ship a reasoning model until they copied DeepSeek R1's homework, and they've all copied DS-style super-sparse MoEs at this point too.