I'm not enough of a conspiracy nut to say the whole HF thing was a PR ploy from the start, but they are certainly milking it well.

Open models are on their heels and their attempts at regulatory capture are not moving as fast as they would like. So it's time to market this incident in a way that gives them monopoly on closed models, with heavy safeguards that are only lifted for selected customers, and laws limiting the use of open weight models.