I think that we only see these bans because AI has become such a massive political issue in the last year.

Define “political” when it comes to Zig and AI.

You have to do better than that if you're going to accuse the Zig team specifically of this.

That doesn't pass Occam's razor. The simpler explanation is that the bans exist because people continue to throw slop at open source maintainers, and the maintainers wish to stop such unproductive contributions.