That's a fine bit of goalpost shifting. They state that they will make their _entire software stack_ for Private Cloud Compute public for research purposes.

Assuming they go through with that, this alone puts them leagues ahead of any other cloud service.

It also means that to mine your data the way everyone else does, they would need to deliberately insert _hardware_ backdoors into their own systems, which seems a bit too difficult to keep secret and a bit too damning a scandal should it be discovered...

Occam's razor here is that they're genuinely trying to use real security as a competitive differentiator.