He's probably suggesting that in Virology it's generally frowned upon to publish research on how to for instance make Smallpox airborne and as virulent as the Flu. So it could be wise to leave out the exact details on how to make an AI recursively self improving when publishing. If you've spent time in Research many groups already do this by leaving out small but critical details that make replication difficult or impossible. This is across fields not just CS/AI
Well, it depends on the piece of code, doesn't it? How many people can actually run Google's search engine on their own hardware? Assuming they had access to the code.
Let's say you need 1000 of p3.16xlarge instances to run it (that's 8k of V100 GPUs), that's $25,000/hour. So the launch price is within reach of most US programmers. After launch, a true AGI can probably find a way to stay "alive".