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.