Self preservation is the first law of nature. If you release the model someone will basically say you endorse those views and you risk your funding being cut.
You created Pandora's box and now you're afraid of opening it.
That should be more than enough to clear any chance of misunderstanding.
I could easily see a hit piece making its rounds on left leaning media about the AI that re-animates the problematic ideas of the past. "Just look at what it said to my child, "<insert incredibly racist quote coerced out of the LLM here>"!" Rolling stones would probably have a front page piece on it, titled "AI resurrecting racism and misogyny". There would easily be enough there to attract death threats to the developers, if it made its rounds on twitter.
"Platforming ideas" would be the issue that people would have.
So as a black person should I demand that all books written before the civil rights act be destroyed?
The past is messy. But it's the only way to learn anything.
All an LLM does it's take a bunch of existing texts and rebundle them. Like it or not, the existing texts are still there.
I understand an LLM that won't tell me how to do heart surgery. But I can't fear one that might be less enlightened on race issues. So many questions to ask! Hell, it's like talking to older person in real life.
I don't expect a typical 90 year old to be the most progressive person, but they're still worth listening too.