[notahacker]

That's effectively answered a paragraph down. Sama cancelled the contract after being asked by OpenAI to collect material that was illegal under US law, at a time when a negative story about work they were doing for Facebook meant that journalists were interested in interviewing their [ex]employees

That's sufficiently risky for a company to be prepared to fire a high profile client, and whilst their margins were huge the value of the actual project was only $200k, which isn't going to seem like riches to Sama's California-based management team.