Or perhaps they've chosen to do this because they feel they have a responsibility to do so.
We understand this when tech companies publish postmortems of outages and security incidents--that it's an attempt to fulfill an obligation to users and the industry (and in some cases regulators), not marketing about how in-demand their product is or something. As far as I can tell we generally accept this as a default hypothesis even from companies led by people like Elon, Zuck and Kalanick--in part because we understand that these companies have thousands of employees, most of whom aren't marketers. Why are we uniquely conspiratorial about OpenAI?
But for that matter, I do believe that big tech companies do not release all the postmortems publicly. I have been impacted by regional outages that never made the status pages across more than one provider. When it goes up - they are committing to publicizing the postmortem.
The whole industry is filled with fuckery. It is not specific to frontier AI firms.
It seems likely that's how the marketing at the frontier labs initially read the moment, but I don't think it is that moment. It is an open question how much regulation is warranted and there seems to be a very strong sentiment from the public and legislators that it should be significant.