It’s code for: we are really interested in continuing to research this and we believe it’s important (for reasons that nobody will really understand apart from the other 5-6 world experts), so we are making this statement as much of a marketing stretch as possible without it being technically dishonest.

Getting research funding is just a brutally competitive game.

It’s code for: We’re not sure what it can do, but throw some more money at us and we’ll eventually tell you!

In lots of published papers there is some kind of call-out for the requirement of future research.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=more...

A sentence like that or a variation thereof is part of the 'dance' around funding.

Swarm of killer robots.

It's code for "this is important and useful to the world, but probably won't lead to any immediately practical applications from the perspective of the funders (economically, militarily, etc.). But we have to say it might or we won't get funded."