It might be that they're equating the name with the app and company, not the open source model, based on one of the first lines:
AI chat apps like ChatGPT collect user data, filter responses, and make content moderation decisions that are not always transparent.
Emphasis mine. The rest of the article reads the same way.
Most people aren't privacy-conscious enough to care who gets what data and who's building the binaries and web apps, so sounding the alarm is appropriate for people who barely know the difference between AI and AGI.
I get that people are mad at Proton right now (anyone have a link? I'm behind on the recent stuff), but we should ensure we get mad at things that are real, not invent imaginary ones based on contrived contexts.