all of google's actions in AI lately seem to have the same explanation: they'd rather you not use their models through the API, they have better things to do with that compute than rent it to you. the rate limits on argon and carbon, the pricing, the general difficulty of access.

this is probably the new flash-lite equivalent, and they probably could serve it for flash-lite pricing. but they don't want to, because then they'd have less capacity for serving it in their own products.