He might see his value in his role of carrying the knowledge itself rather than being its gatekeeper.

I actually got a very different impression. He could publish this interesting result, exactly because he had been working on this project i.e., had an interesting dataset to feed into Claude and had the expertise to interpret its output.

Compare him to those who are burning tokens to generate cringeworthy AI slop on social media. The value of a tool depends on the skill of the user.

And he didn't want to milk that for the rest of his life because he's a smart guy that has other skills and interests