I am not sure where to start. I think this is the new "jet fuel can't melt steel beams". The labs are chaotic, pressure cooker type workplaces where there really is no room for a 4D chess type of stunt, let alone let Hugging Face in on the conspiracy. Moreover, OpenAI is a pretty leaky organization, see e.g. the recent firings of researchers who were using signal to talk to people outside the company.

It just seems like a far simpler hypothesis is that OpenAI are reckless and chaotic, didn't notice what was going on for weeks on end, and wouldn't be able to track down the problem to a specific datacenter and tell them to pull the plug even if they wanted to. But even if you are the most careful lab ever, you are not going to be able to effectively monitor and "pull the plug" on a super intelligent swarm which can cover its own tracks.

Also, in your earlier comment you suggest we are not living in a sci-fi story with sentient robots. But... we've got talking computers in the last 4 years which can now code and solve Millenium prize problems? Seems like we're getting pretty sci-fi to me!