They didn't make a big fuss about it but OpenAI have explained that they instituted ID and country verification because there were competitors distilling their models. Of their competitors do you really think Anthropic, Google or Meta were doing that? It's pretty clear who they were talking about.

Chinese labs are mostly (all?) privately funded, as far as I know. Alibaba isn't a SOE. That's why I didn't mention state subsidies, although that might be happening (and certainly is happening w.r.t. access to electricity).

I didn't mention lax copyright/patent enforcement in the context of AI, but rather, the prior years in which China was able to build up local tech firms capable of taking on the US tech firms. It's mostly in the past now, they don't need to do that stuff anymore.