That was very strange for me as well, as the original stated goal of OpenAI was to decentralize power. It looks like instead of that they just want to be one more of the few powerful entities.
It's possible they would be willing to share with legitimate researchers who ask. Putting it out there for anyone to download is not the only way to do it.
If they thing OpenAI made isn't interesting enough of a discovery without its data (because it's all arbitrary anyway), but is very useful to spammers as a piece of code, OpenAI has truly achieved the 200% opposite goals they were looking for.
I mean the Faceswap people have the same problem. They could give less a shit about porn. But that's what people used it for.
I thought OpenAI's goal was to make sure that the first Strong General AI was also a SAFE AI, to the point that they've said that if it looks like they're not going to win that race they'll work for the leader instead? Under the theory that if it's a race at the end then corners will be cut that might doom us all, while them throwing their weight behind the leaders would allow enough margin over the #3 AI development program to go slow and get safety right.