The headline implies they selectively removed the word "safely," but that doesn't seem to be the case.

From the thread you linked, there's a diff of mission statements over the years[0], which reveals that "safely" (which was only added 2 years prior) was removed only because they completely rewrote the statement into a single, terse sentence.

There could be stronger evidence to prove if OpenAI is deemphasizing safety, but this isn't one.

[0]: https://gist.github.com/simonw/e36f0e5ef4a86881d145083f759bc...