Placing a model behind a “Use `curl` after generating an API key using `gcloud auth login` and accepting the terms of service” is probably a good idea. Anything but the largest models equipped with search to ground generation is going to hallucinate at a high enough rate that a rando can see it.

You need to gate away useful technology from the normies, usually. E.g. kickstarter used to have a problem where normies would think they were pre-ordering a finished product and so they had to pivot to being primarily a pre-order site.

Anything that is actually experimental and has less than very high performance needs to be gated away from the normies.