tbh I always wondered why do they call themselves 'openai' since models are not open. But does that mean people should do things like what OP says..

It should not have surprised anybody that publicly run models would be censored. OpenAI has a mission that they are not keeping secret at all.

Apart from that, censoring what one's web service can be used for is a very common CYA strategy to avoid damage to the brand and not causing governments to push through overtly harsh laws.

Differently from social networks, model censoring does not even remotely restrict anyones constitutional rights. And who really wants to run big uncensored models can just use open source ones (which are approaching GPT 3.5 performance) and run them on 2nd hand GPUs from ebay since for LLMs bulk VRAM is more important than raw processing speed.