the entire organisational structure of openAI was literally designed for exactly that. Like Mozilla, the for-profit arm of the company is legally subject to the non-profit.
This hinges on Open ai being as forthcoming with new models as they previously were. I'm not sure that's going to happen. Certainly the new board will be more inherently against it. Not sure what outs they have though besides the obvious one.
Microsoft hasn't released all its investment into OpenAI, and I think this could trigger some special contingency in their agreement to stopping doing so.
I think one thing is for certain: OpenAI now, won't worth that much any more.
Maybe they can. Maybe they can't. We don't even know if "the talks" to return Sama were just investors writing angry emails to Ilya and him replying "nuh-ah".