The difference is that in the former scenario, the one OpenAI is supposedly protecting us from, the danger is that OpenAI is "too good", possible of doing damage by supposed nefarious actors: something generating hundreds of fake news articles a second which are all perfectly believable.
The danger in the latter scenario is that OpenAI is garbage: when used to answer a perfectly innocuous request, it regurgitates disinformation and biased results. OpenAI can't gatekeep for "bad" people since it's actually good people interacting with dangerous AI. Like when asked to solve a simple math problem, it just gets the math straight up wrong, but people trust it.
OpenAI wants us to believe its AI is so good it needs to be protected from "bad people" and built its safety protocols around that threat model, when it seems far more likely the latter is going to happen, and they haven't done a thing to protect us from that.