They used to have in their AI ethics department some of the most anti-AI progressives. They picked on everything - biased training data, discriminatory usage, consuming too much energy to train, models are just stochastic parrots, etc. while forgetting to mention any effort to mitigate the problems (of course these are real concerns and being under intense research) Now these critics are fired, but Google must have learned to fear them.

If they let everyone use the latest models, critics could uncover ugly biases in 10 minutes. Then Google would have to do damage control. These models are very suggestible. You can induce them to make fools of themselves.