Ironically it's the opposite - they
have to care. Companies like OpenAI are forced to virtue signal because if they don't, the Verge will publish an article at 8:00AM tomorrow titled "Transphobic/Homophobic Model Now Hits Public Availability" and there's nothing Altman or Trump can do about that. They'd just watch their stock value slide while Anthropic or Mistral becomes the next global darling with HugBoxLLM or whatever the hell. That's free market capitalism at play - doing anything else is simply bad business strategy.
> but if outing and killing gay people would be profitable they'd do that instead
Certainly; we'd see new businesses spring up overnight if the government offered a price for every Christian head you brought them. But we haven't seen that in a while (much less from a modern, accountable government) and very few stable businesses would risk their identity on something like that if it wasn't going to last.
The bigger issue moreover is that businesses don't want to slaughter gay people or Christians because they are paying customers. Political businesses fail in America because taking any stance is the enemy of popularity and makes you ripe for legitimate and viral controversy.
Call it cancel culture if you want, but it's a bipartisan force that segregates politics from business simply through market aggregation.