Anthropic's "Pace the frontier" is a facially unlawful conspiracy to restrict markets. Imposing these restrictions in their product offerings is an overt act that they're taking to facilitate their unlawful market rigging conspiracy. (since their agreement with their conspirators won't have a full impact if upstarts or direct consumers can just take existing SOTA and use it to produce a competing product, routing around their oligopoly).

There is no legitimate purpose to restrict the ability to optimize accelerator kernels except to inhibit competition in this space-- it is the most benign and harmless act imaginable. There is at least some debate to be had about things like computer-security capabilities, but nothing is being damaged by AI inference being made 10% faster except the ability of market leaders to extract rents.