Cover your ass is not the same thing as malicious intent.

The mandate is to hold bitcoin. They attempt to hold bitcoin. They are not allowed by the mandate to own anything else. In the event of a fork, they will try to pick the winning coin (to stick with the mandate) but there is no guarantee they will be correct in which coin they choose.

If there were an ETF before the fork wars, and it did not have this disclosure, they would be required to hold BTC, BCH, BSV, BSABC etc. Think it was bad? It would have been so much worse with a multi-billion dollar ETF required to hold them all in proportion (and keep buying the losers to keep up with capital inflows) instead of picking a winner and dumping the rest.

So they have to pick a winner. But if they get it wrong, the company would be on the hook for billions of dollars in liability and failure to disclose the risk of getting it wrong. Think I'm joking? There is an active lawsuit against the second most valuable company in the world because they failed to accurately disclose their overexposure to crypto mining (the same business decision that set them up to be the big AI chip winner and potentially become the most valuable company in the world).