The team that found it is at least partly academic; they published a paper on a free-start collision at CRYPTO 2015, and made a prediction there about how long

The team that found it is at least partly academic; they published a paper on a free-start collision at CRYPTO 2015, and made a prediction there about how long it would take them and how much it would cost to find a full collision, which was more or less accurate. They are hash function researchers, not spies or hackers. There's no reason to believe they were hiding anything.