Not sure it’s particularly odd. Several models of late have launched with an introductory promotional pricing, only to later lock in the promotional pricing.

Too many models now to remember specifics - I believe deepseek v4 did this and one of the gpt models (5? 5.1? 6?) did this if I recall correctly. I’m also fairly confident Google has had a few promotional periods on launch of the model, I seem to remember them starting the trend.