I think the reasonable ethical question to consider when a company has an incentive to prove its value, and learns of the state of the art of a flashy research topic being close to a solution, and then throws loads of resources at trying to solve it first. I agree that "AI" didn't "take" but it's not an incomprehensible shortcut of criticism of the aforementioned behavior, not that precision should be avoided here.
I agree though if they did plagarism it's really really bad for OpenAI. They would instantly have evaporated all remaining good will to gloat over a stolen discovery.
I think there's an important part which is that the nature of the beast implies there's effectively zero way to do that.
They have no idea what context, triggering this pathway, was from this guys reddit post 4 years ago.
I also assume that if any AI lab could actually do that it'd be an instant pissing context over who gives who credit the mostest. "This software engineer wrote a sick sorting algorthm everyone now uses, thank you random dude for that training contribution"
Maybe we will in the future, maybe we'll learn that the solution to this prize is from 3 peoples schizo rant on reddit a decade ago. Would be kinda sick actually.