Yes, they've been trying to do that in various forms since the 2009 Fermi GPU GTX 480 which crippled FP64. It never works. But it does create technical debt to work around their nonsense.

So unless they cripple CUDA altogether, there will always be efficient workarounds (arguably DirectX or OpenGL programmable shaders in the very worst-case scenario). They even gave up on doing so for GTX Titan Black and then resumed with Maxwell. Currently, I would not be surprised that the lack of a true consumer Volta GPU is their only play at crippling consumer Volta by making it effectively nonexistent or $3000 for the GTX Titan V.

What they could do across the board is hamfistedly disable the deep learning frameworks on GeForce. That would probably stop 90% of amateur hour data science on GeForce. But the remaining 10% would just recompile them without the cripple code in violation of some sort of scary EULA clause against doing so and requiring such cripple code in all HPC/AI applications. I would love to see them try this - they'll pry my FP32 MADs (which is the core operation of AI/ML as well as vertex and pixel shaders) from my cold dead consumer GPU desktop.

I don't think they'll do that though. They know the low-end is the entry point to their ecosystem. They just want to force people to graduate into the high-end after hooking them. Not that you have to: multiplication and addition want to be free.