I actually misworded this. OpenAI did not ask to remove a co-author, they only invited Buckmaster as a coauthor and not Alpöge. Having Alpöge (an Anthropic employee) on an OpenAI paper is bad optics, so they only wanted Buckmaster.
And how is it bad optics? Seems to me it would be a good look, where OpenAI would appear magnanimous and interested in fairness rather than craven and sociopathic. Which is how they look now, regardless of your attempts to distract from this.
