This is an interesting question; not to be too naive, but are there examples in the wild about this scenario? First I’ve heard of private APIs for something open source like this and my interest is piqued!
That kinda proves they would spend it on executive salaries. As the spend on "radical groups" in the article is almost nothing compared to salaries of their management.
I don't know if the link you posted answers the question, I get a blocked page ("You are visiting this page because we detected an unsupported browser"). You'd think a chromium-based browser would be supported but even that isn't good enough. I love open standards like html and http...
Edit: just noticed it goes to hackerone and not curl's own website. Of course they'd say curl can't solve payments on their own
Do you think Anthropic might request you implement private APIs?