I think I agree with your original statement now. It still feels slightly misleading though, as while ‘keeping up with the competition’ won’t provide the motivation (as there putatively is no competition), there will still be strong incentives to sell at any capability level. (And as you say this may be overcome by an even stronger incentive to hoard frontier intelligence for their own R&D and strategising use. But this outweighs rather than annuls the direct economic incentive to make a packet of money by selling access to your latest system.)
I think I agree with your original statement now. It still feels slightly misleading though, as while ‘keeping up with the competition’ won’t provide the motivation (as there putatively is no competition), there will still be strong incentives to sell at any capability level. (And as you say this may be overcome by an even stronger incentive to hoard frontier intelligence for their own R&D and strategising use. But this outweighs rather than annuls the direct economic incentive to make a packet of money by selling access to your latest system.)