It turns out U.S. law doesn’t have jurisdiction across the entire world, nor does Anthropic and OAI’s rather blatant attempt to buy government influence.

Well its not law. Its more terms of service.

For example, if OpenAI / Anthropic were actually open, other US labs could be building near-frontier open weights models by distilling off OpenAI / Anthropic. But because US companies don't want to be sued, US labs who obey terms of service, will be at a disadvantage to Chinese peers.

Maybe US labs need to just not care and distill from OpenAI / Anthropic anyways?