Comment by Miraste

That's the only explanation that makes sense. If it was frontier but cost or compute were limiting factors, they'd release it at an obscene price for the bragging rights. Google doesn't care that much about alignment, and I don't think it's likely to be significantly different than 3.5 anyway. The only reason it would need to be soft-canceled is if it's terrible, and has to end up in a ditch like Llama 4 to avoid shareholder panic.