[vagabund]

I think you're reading too much into this. The natural reading is quite clearly that the illegal categories referred to were or included "C4", and it'd be highly unethical for them to have framed the paragraph in that manner if they believed that not to be the case. It's worth noting that OpenAI's PR statement only goes so far as to call the situation a miscommunication, and doesn't directly assign blame to Sama, while Sama explicitly claims OpenAI asked for illegal categories in subsequent instructions.

Also, I'm not up on the laws regarding this stuff, but are the other, awful categories illegal to collect? If not, there's not much room for ambiguity.

[thinking4real]

“if Time could confidently say that OpenAI asked for C4 images, they would have absolutely put that in the article.”

All your word salad ignores this reality.