Or--wait for it--they care more about money and/or fame than about AI safety.
Most people are only actually interested in the kind of AI safety OpenAI should be caring about, which is spearheading the proper regulatory and policy systems to ready our economic/technological landscape for the disruptive tidal wave forming on the horizon.
FWIW, a take I often see on HN is that any regulation is effectively a barrier to entry, as larger companies find it easier to deal with them than the smaller ones. But if so, then this only means that "barriers to entry" is not a valid argument against regulations, not unless specific barriers are mentioned.
But there is something implicit in what you're saying that I don't agree with and I think a fair few others won't as well.
That is: "We don't mind barriers to entry" or "they're not a problem to avoid".
On it's own it's fine, e.g. we have good barriers like the medical profession arguably. But barriers to entry also has a negative value because we all want "competition", we like small businesses, and we also don't like monopolies due to their ability to abuse their market share. So it's not as straight forward, "barriers to entry" is not something we can dismiss as a valid argument.
1) Over the years, I've seen a lot of HN comments expressing the belief that "all barriers to entry are bad; regulation always creates barriers to entry, therefore specific regulation under discussion is bad";
2) The reasoning behind "regulation always creates barriers to entry" is that larger companies have it easier to adjust to regulatory changes, by virtue of having more financial buffer, a lot of lawyers on retainer, and perhaps even some influence on the shape of the law changes in question;
3) I agree with 2), but I disagree this is always, or even usually, a problem. I also disagree with "all barriers to entry are bad", and therefore I disagree with 1) in general. The reasoning behind my dismissal is that it's trivial to think of examples of laws and explicit barriers to entry that are net beneficial for the market, for the customers, and for the society.
4) Once you realize 1) is obviously false as an absolute statement ("all barriers to entry are bad"), you should realize that mentioning barriers to entry as implied negative is a rhetorical trick. Onus is on the person bringing it up to show that specific barrier to entry under discussion is a net negative, as there is no reason to actually assume it.
Microsoft. That should be enough cause for concern, really.
The funny thing, though, was that it didn't provide any sources for that second response. I pointed out the discrepancy and it told me I was right and here are some sources and provided yet another unsourced summary of how Microsoft was great, basically writing its own sources itself. When I insisted twice more using different wording and requesting no primary sources it started retconning its arguments, but all the sources were from microsoft.com regardless. It was all very ironic.
It is seriously annoying when it does it. Probably the weights of what they want to have happen somehow get shoved in there and you have to basically prune them out one by one to unstick it. Simple statements like 'that seems to be wrong' do not unstick it. You basically have to say 'remove all references of XYZ from this conversation and do not bring it up again'