It comes down to the original purpose of OpenAI - to create safe AI before the next guy created unsafe ones.

The thing is we are seeing lots of AI startups come out of nowhere. OpenAI is ironically one, but there's also Midjourney, etc, who are beating all these FAAMNGs with billion dollar budgets. The more progress one company makes, the faster everyone else goes. It's like how EV development was just a bit corp hobby project until Tesla came in.

Plugins were already being unofficially developed. Same goes for ChatGPT APIs. There was originally a waitlist for the API. But bots somehow made it past the captchas.