Its far more likely that Microsoft is just trying to salvage their investment in the most direct way possible. It doesn’t make sense for them to take this risk absent recent events.
They tried pressuring the board according to the rumors over the weekend. That didn’t work; now they are providing a home for the people that were going to leave OpenAI over this.
If they are smart they will honor the 10B deal as well and continue funding OpenAI. This way they will get the benefit of both teams and maybe even a bit more now that they will be competing.
My bet is that OpenAI heard of this MSFT poach, Sam et al were not forthright and meanwhile were becoming very interested in the engineering details.