>but they are leaving the door open ("we cannot rule out that") as to whether the model they used to do it had been trained on the anonymized date from the researchers who's approach they ended up copying.

This is just lawyer speak. Maybe there was a small reward from a possible thumbs up on any of the chat sessions. Open AI have no way of knowing if that happened or not and the chances that, if this did happen, that it had anything to do with their solution of Navier Stokes is extremely unlikely.

>to try to threaten the professor who had been working on this not to publish and to co-operate with their telling of the story.

There was never a threat to not publish their own work with whatever credit to whoever. This was about the offer to be a lead author on the paper that Open AI authored, an invitation that was not extended to Levant.