This is Anth's typical marketing playbook, a hat tip to their so-called "safetyist" roots, a differentiator against OpenAI's more permissive access[0]. Coke vs. Pepsi.

"We made a model that's so dangerous we couldn't possibly release it to the public! The only responsible thing is so simply limit its release to a subset of the population that coincidentally happens to align with our token ethos."

The reality is they just don't have the compute for gen pop scale.

They did this exact strategy going back several model versions.

[0] ironically, OpenAI has some pretty insane capabilities that they haven't given the public access to (just ask Spielberg). The difference is they don't make a huge marketing push to tell everyone about it.