"We can say categorically that it is impossible for Dr. Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the last two months to have influenced the system in any way, including training."
This is the third day of total hysteria that is based on nothing of substance. Move on folks.
I can say categorically that OpenAI is not a credible or trustworthy company.
Where did OpenAI say this?
And it still leaves open the question of the prompt itself, which can just as easily encode information about the same knowledge.
Regardless, they started working on this problem after hearing that one of their customers was already working on it. It almost doesn't matter about the training data. This is the provider you are paying undermining your career.
Even if that were true, they've already admitting to throwing vast quantities of resources to scoop a researcher who was about to publish (because they'd learned, somehow, of his breakthrough). If that doesn't bother you I think you need to take a step back and have a good think about this.