This is really just the mirror image of what I was originally criticizing. Any decision made by a corporation is a decision made by a person. You don't get to ignore the morality of your decisions just because you're collecting a paycheck. If you're a moral person, the decisions you make at work should reflect that.
Whenever any large organization takes a "think of the children" stance, it's almost always in service of another goal, with the trivial exception of single-issue organizations that specifically care about that issue. This doesn't preclude individuals, even within the organization, from caring about a given issue. But a company like OpenAI that is actively considering its own version of slop-tok almost certainly cares about profit more than children, and its senior members are in the business of making money for their investors, which, again, takes precedence over their own individual thoughts on child safety. It just so happens that in this case, child safety is a convenient argument for guard rails, which neatly avoids having to contend with advertisers, which is about the money.
Executives are beholden to laws, regulations, and shareholder interests. They may also have teams of advisors and board members convincing them of the wisdom of decisions they wouldn't have arrived at on their own. They may not even have a strong opinion on a particular decision, but assent to one direction as a result of internal politics or shareholder/board pressure. Not everything is a clear-cut decision with one "moral" option and one "immoral" option.
OpenAI and Anthropic are both PBCs. So neither of them are supposedly purely motivated by this thing.
To the extent that a large corporation can be said to "believe" or "mean" anything, that seems like a fair statement to me. It's just a more specific case of pointing out that for-profit corporations as entities are ultimately motivated by profit, not public benefit (even if specific founders/employees/shareholders are individually motivated by certain ideals).