That's rewriting history. What they said at the time:

> Nearly a year ago we wrote in the OpenAI Charter : “we expect that safety and security concerns will reduce our traditional publishing in the future, while increasing the importance of sharing safety, policy, and standards research,” and we see this current work as potentially representing the early beginnings of such concerns, which we expect may grow over time. This decision, as well as our discussion of it, is an experiment: while we are not sure that it is the right decision today, we believe that the AI community will eventually need to tackle the issue of publication norms in a thoughtful way in certain research areas. -- https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/

Then over the next few months they released increasingly large models, with the full model public in November 2019 https://openai.com/index/gpt-2-1-5b-release/ , well before ChatGPT.

> Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not releasing the trained model. As an experiment in responsible disclosure, we are instead releasing a much smaller model for researchers to experiment with, as well as a technical paper.

I wouldn't call it rewriting history to say they initially considered GPT-2 too dangerous to be released. If they'd applied this approach to subsequent models rather than making them available via ChatGPT and an API, it's conceivable that LLMs would be 3-5 years behind where they currently are in the development cycle.

They said:

> Due to concerns about large language models being used to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale, we are only releasing a much smaller version of GPT‑2 along with sampling code (opens in a new window).

"Too dangerous to release" is accurate. There's no rewriting of history.