Setting aside the legalities for a moment, a nontrivial part of OpenAI's advantage in the LLM space has been its ability to incentivize feedback mechanisms - to

Setting aside the legalities for a moment, a nontrivial part of OpenAI's advantage in the LLM space has been its ability to incentivize feedback mechanisms - to own the interface in which generated text is presented, own the widget where someone gives it a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, and re-integrate that feedback at scale into its fine-tuning. Of course they'd want to leave the door open to building their own products, in order to continue to be able to present those widgets and have exclusive access to the resulting data. Just because ChatGPT+Plugins isn't going to be the center of people's lives (did anyone truly think it would?) doesn't mean that when they have another product idea that they have unique insight into, they won't want to bring it to the world directly.