Especially in the early days where the largest donor to OpenAI was Musk who was leading Tesla, a company way behind in AI capabilities, OpenAI looked like an obvious "Commoditize Your Complement" play.
For quite some time where they were mainly publishing research and they could hide behind "we are just getting started" that guise held up nicely, but when they struck gold with Chat(GPT), their was more and more misalignment between their actions and their publicly stated goal.