I feel OpenAI has stayed fairly close to its mission and principles. I'm not sure about why so much secrecy, they could have just NDAed and let the reporter take look at things which is common practice even at Apple. However, apart from that, they are the only ones explicitly sensitive to safety and economic issues surrounding AGI. Specifically, AGI is certain to generate the first trillionaire or even deca-trillionaire and throw the wealth gap between countries completely out of control. Unlike guns and nukes, it would be a far more difficult tech to clone for less fortunate groups. I think OpenAI is the only group actively working against that outcome (i.e. max 100X return provision) while most others wish to race to AGI first, patent the hell out of it and become the most powerful richest entity world would have ever seen. Also, until recently with only 200 folks and limited pay (relatively speaking), they have amassed extraordinary talent that has given run for its money to teams 10X larger. When people say that they just try to copy/scale others innovation, they grossly underestimate very impressive contributions that has touched virtually everything from supervised, unsupervised, RL, NLP and robotics.