It’s not quite at the same level but it reminds me of YouTubers who get products from companies for free for a “review” and then they say “no money exchanged hands”. The incentives are implicit wink-wink and everyone knows it except the audience.
In the case of Cowork I didn't even get preview access, I learned about it at the same moment as everyone else did. There was no incentive from Anthropic to write about it at all (and I expect they may have preferred me not to bang on about prompt injection risks or point out the bugs in their artifacts implementation.)
Honestly, constantly having to fend off accusations of being a shill is pretty tiring.