It's basically a "if we really have to support this for a long time, we want to be compensated for that" pricing strategy. It's about long term maintenance cost being greater _because_ it will be irrelevant.

They want to maintain the perception that Flash is worth $7.5/mot, so they can charge more for the next one.

Its probably just a corporate symptom, weird stuff like this happens in messy large orgs.

Maybe they know something we don't. What if all frontier lab do this? Maybe this is actual cost of running these llm.