If it's all business as usual and being scooped is no big deal, why was OpenAI in such a rush? They didn't have to launch this effort on the very day they heard the rumor, run "on the order of 10,000 concurrent agents", or try to coordinate announcement scheduling with Buckmaster in the middle of a long weekend. It seems to me that they understood very well this was not a "business as usual" announcement, and devoted huge amounts of money and focus to maximize the chance that they were first.

I think you're making the opposite conclusion than what I intended?

Being scooped is a big deal for the one getting scooped.

It has never been a big deal for the one doing the scooping. History is full of math and science results being scooped. For example, we keep calling it Pythagoras' theorem a few thousand years later.