I don't really get it, seems like a gate keeping exercise for the academic community.
Of course OpenAI and others will hype any LLM led/assisted research results, and the media will find juicy headlines to write about it. But in the end they are publishing findings, and the academic community can gauge the developments and decide what they want to do with them. To me that seems like research working as expected.
The academic community gatekeeps to ensure members of the community are not stealing from each other or are otherwise committing unethical acts.
There are typically processes to ensure rigor in the findings and to weed out crap.
It doesn't always work, but it tends to work much better than any other community
There might be a paradox here. We need closed communities to weed out slop. But we need open communities to weed out corruption.
We need (and have) clopen communities. (Or, as a biologist might say, semi-permeable)