You're absolutely correct that they're a for-profit firm, but you're missing that they were founded specifically over safety concerns. Basically it's not just "commercial motive" in general, it's the sense that OpenAI was only paying lipservice to safety work as a marketing move.

For example, here's their research mission: https://www.anthropic.com/research

And an example of one of their early research focuses, Constitutional AI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.08073