alt Hacker NewsNeutering OpenAI and Anthropic would be my guess. Commoditized LLMs won't hurt Google nearly as much as it hurts the LLM-only companies, and so accelerating the inevitable just helps knock out potential future competition in areas where Google -does- make a lot of money now.
I think this plays a part, but the truth is that Google doesn't need to do that, Chinese open models are already doing that by themselves.
So perhaps another part is just Google showing that they can indeed play at the big boys table.