> serving via API gives them valuable usage data

It might give them a bit, but AFAIK most institutions (especially non-American ones) aren't exactly overly happy about using closed American APIs in order to do science, especially not because API usage isn't reproducible.

Sure, they might be able to play around with some toy data, but for Google to actually get valuable usage data, then they need to let people actually use the thing for real things, and then you cannot gate it behind a API, it isn't feasible in a real-world environment.