The other explanation may be that these AI labs may be expecting more government scrutiny, and "here's a document" would probably go better than "here's some vector representation of our values" when talking to politicians.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.09685
[2] https://vgel.me/posts/representation-engineering/
[3] https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024/scaling-monosemanticit...
EDIT: I see, the control vectors operate more directly upon the model, in a way embedding vectors don’t quite have access to.
I think the more likely reason is it doesn't work as well as in context learning. Otherwise they would prefer to avoid polluting context and degrading performance.
Does there exist a model X that behaves exactly as a model Y with context Z? Maybe, but it's not trivial to achieve and might possibly be convoluted and more expensive.