That doesn't really make sense. If Amazon wanted to build hype, wouldn't they have talked publicly about this? What's the point of working hard on a hype strategy and then delivering it only in private to government officials?

The export ban exists to hype the capabilities of the much more expensive but only marginally better model.

The model that they can't currently sell at all because they don't have the capability to limit it to US persons?

Opus was already rate limited. If the capacity isn't there its better just used for hype.