is this coin still controlled by claymore?
Claymore is simply an awesome dev.
Claymore is the CEO of Monero?

Is it true?
No. He is not.
He only developes the miner as far as I know.
But one should stick with open source miners. This way you are not dependent on a single piece of software you can not control to get your rig running.
If you only got a few CPUs or cards, it not a big deal, but if you own a farm, you can get in trouble very fast with AMD and a closed source miner.
Speaking of network safety: Just imagine a closed source mining software for AMD GPUs that stops working on a specific date in the future. It would cripple the network down to less than 50% nominal rate and leave it exposed to all kind of nasty things... you do not want that. Really.