Comment by aenis

That it was a dick move, I think there is no doubt about that. OpenAI wanted to scoop Anthropic, and the two guys working on the problem got caught in the crossfire.

Both OpenAI and the researchers know if the sessions in questions were subject to data sharing. Why neither the scientists nor OpenAI is clear about that is weird - it would seem at least one party has the incentive to report that. But even if their sessions were in training data sets its hard to tell whether it influenced the outcome. Those models are big, but are they big enough to preserve subtle, niche techniques enough to draw from them while solving a related problem? Probably nobody knows.