In this context, this is about the idea of AI safety. This can either refer to the more short-term concerns about AI helping to spread misinformation (e.g. ChatGPT being used to churn out massive amounts of fake news) or implicit biases (e.g. "predictive policing" using AI to analyze crime data that ends up incarcerating minorities because of accidental biases in its training set). Or it can refer to the longer term fears about a super-human intelligence that would end up acting against humanity for various reasons, and efforts to create a super-human AI that would have the same moral goals as us (and the fear that a non-safe AGI could be accidentally created).
In this specific conversation, one of the proposed scenarios is that Ilya Sutskever wanted to focus OpenAI more on AI safety at the possible detriment of fast advancements towards intelligence, and at the detriment of commercialization; while Sam Altman wants to prioritize the other two over excessive safety concerns. The new CEO is stating that this is not the core reason why the board took their decision.