As a category moderator who reads all posts and was working to get an answer for the ChatGPT Team invite question, I was equally surprised by the response.
In reading your post, two thoughts come to mind:
- As many have noted, OpenAI has customers willing to pay more for additional products like ChatGPT Team, each with different configurations. In your case, the ability to limit just the owner of the ChatGPT Team account to sending invites is a welcome option or additional plan.
- The owner of a ChatGPT Team account should have the ability to set a hard limit on the number of seats and adjust it as needed. This way, the current design could allow any user to invite others, but the invite would fail if a new user joins, exceeding the hard limit. Not a perfect solution, but one that might mitigate the problem and be an acceptable change for OpenAI to ChatGPT Team.