“Independent experts disagreed with the Colossal Biosciences' claim that these animals are de-extinct dire wolves, asserting that they are "not a dire wolf under any definition of a species ever". The IUCN Species Survival Commission Canid Specialist Group officially declared that the three animals are neither dire wolves nor proxies of the dire wolves based on the IUCN SSC guiding principles on creating proxies of extinct species for conservation benefit. They commented that creating phenotypic proxies does not change the conservation status of an extinct species and may instead threaten the extant species such as gray wolves, and therefore concluded that the Colossal Biosciences' project "does not contribute to conservation." Colossal Biosciences released a clarifying document Alignment of Colossal's Dire Wolf De-Extinction Project with IUCN SSC Guiding Principles in response.
In May 2025, the company's chief scientist Beth Shapiro stated that the three animals are "grey wolves with 20 edits" as purportedly stated by the company "from the very beginning", acknowledging that it is impossible to bring back an extinct organism, or at least an organism "identical to a species that used to be alive". She stated that the term "dire wolves" applied to the pups are a colloquialism. This was called a "major departure from what Colossal had said previously".