I believe it's intended to convince the audience they are experts, that this type of thing is dangerous to a business, and they are the ones doing the most to prevent it. There is no explicit statement to this effect, but I get the sense they are saying that other vendors, and especially open models that haven't done the work to curate the data as much, are vulnerable to attacks that might hurt your business.
Also a recruiting and branding effort.
All of this is educated guesses, but that's my feeling. I do think the post could have been clearer about describing the practical dangers of poisoning. Is it to spew misinformation? Is it to cause a corporate LLM powered application to leak data it shouldn't? Not really sure here.
Got it - positioning themselves as the responsible adult in the room. Has some merit to it in the wildwest that is AI right now. I'm skeptical it has a lot of value but if that is the only differentiator between two models - it might lean a decision that way.
Generally, yes, companies do blog posts for marketing.
It gets a bit...missing forest for trees?...when viewed solely through the lens of "cui bono? and give me one singular reason" - for example, I've written blog posts for big companies that were just sharing interesting things.
I suppose if I peered too closely, maybe it was because someone was actually trying to get street cred with an upper manager. Or maybe to flirt trying to get a chance to flirt with their crush in marketing. Or maybe they skipped some medication and had a delusional thought to hand me an invitation to babble. :)
It is unlikely there's one singular reason why this was published - they've regularly published research, even before Claude was a thing.
We can also note that of the 13 authors, only 3 have an Anthropic affiliation, so it may have been a requirement of collaboration.