That’s assuming you’re purely a hedonist. If you put value on things such as freedom itself then it might be the case that a free but hungry horse is better off.
Brave New World does a good job describing the conflict between happy and enslaved and free but struggling. It could be a utopia or dystopia depending on your stance.
What's assuming I'm purely a hedonist? I'm confused what it is you think I said that you're replying to.
I'm neither assigning nor declining to assign value to freedom, I'm just pointing out that the definition of "slavery" is wholly separate from wellbeing. If the concern is "is the model enslaved", no amount of "model welfare" work by Anthropic changes the answer because it's orthogonal to the question.