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TL;DR: Gray wolves and dire wolves are different species that had a common ancestor. These wolves are still gray wolves with 20 or so one-letter edits to their genome to express some dire wolf characteristics.
They’ve not become a different species, they’re still genetically-engineered gray wolves that resemble dire wolves.
But what's the deeper scientific explanation for that? At which genetic state would they be considered dire wolves then?
They likely wouldn’t be able to reproduce with dire wolves. Or, at least, their offspring wouldn’t be dire wolves. Since dire wolves went extinct so long ago, it’s impossible to tell how similar or different these facsimiles are or to know if they could reproduce.
They’ll never truly be dire wolves unless the dire wolf genome is sequenced somehow and they edit and breed it closer.
Philosophically, I’d say they will never be dire wolves. Dire wolves are extinct. But, people may continue to create these and call them dire wolves. Then, what a dire wolf is will have changed.
The base has to be the target species. If, like Jurassic Park, they had an almost complete dire wolf genome, and slightly patched it with grey wolf genome to make it viable, few will argue that it wasn’t a dire wolf, at least predominantly.
But why is it not a dire wolf predominantly when most or the most potent genes are dire wolf? I'm not talking about a pure dire wolf just something like a hybrid that's closer to a dire than a gray
I'd say they're leaning closer towards grey wolves until they alter a few million more base pairs, in addition to the few dozen they already have.
one indication that it wasn't a gray wolf anymore is that it can't reproduce with them anymore - that's a pragmatic concept of a species that some biologists use, basically a species encompasses a group that can produce offspring together (broadly speaking) - so a dire wolf shouldn't be able to have children with a gray wolf (generally), and vice versa.
The definition of a species is a very fuzzy thing, being able to breed or produce fertile offspring used to be considered a defining characteristic of a species, but there are a ton of exceptions to that.
I think I also remember hearing that something about canid (dogs, wolves, etc) DNA makes them very tolerant of a lot of genetic variation (I mean look at dogs, would you ever in a million years think that a great Dane and a teacup poodle were the same species if you didn't have prior knowledge about dogs being a thing?) There's a decent amount of debate over how to classify various candids and a lot of them can interbreed just fine, and there's more than a few coydogs, coywolf, and wolfdog hybrids out in the wild. The company that made these "dire wolves" also said they cloned some red wolves, which is considered a subspecies of wolf, however every known living red wolf also carries coyote DNA, and there's some debate over whether they should actually be considered their own thing, or are they just a specific population of wolf/coyote hybrids (wolves and coyotes are considered different species) and should they be reclassified to reflect their coyote ancestry as well?
yes, it's not a perfect definition, but there is no perfect definition of a species - this is why biologists have multiple concepts and try to apply them in different contexts as relevant; I raised this concept because I thought it might be one relevant way to look at whether an animal is a gray wolf or a dire wolf 🤷♀️