IMO established companies (Meta, Google, etc) had their researchers publish papers as a competitive benefit or way to attract talent from academia (a researcher wouldn't want to stop publishing).
Companies didn't see an issue with doing that because those papers were not "giving away" the core of the company, for example, Facebook's DeepFace paper from 2014 couldn't hurt its ad business.
OpenAI on the other hand will probably be as closed as they can be with their LLMs.