they didn't pay yet, because court challenged settlement as inadequate.

> I doubt the Chinese models operate under similar licensing agreements.

US corps likely pay licenses when afraid to be sued, or have troubles getting that data, otherwise they just take data, which was demonstrated many times. The same apply to Chinese corps, alibaba totally can be sued in US.

China is infamous for weakly enforcing copyright law. Even when it is completely obvious that Chinese labs are training models on pirated data, US copyright holders face a virtually impossible task of proving it in court. Those lawsuits won't go anywhere.