>This is a nakedly hypocritical stance, but completely understandable from a company-needs-to-make-money standpoint.

No, it's perfectly reasonable once you get down to reality.

China is not going to care about IP. That's just a fact. So either nobody cares about IP (at the very last in this context) and any AI company can just do whatever with data, or Chinese companies have to be held up to scrutiny.

We don't have the privilege to be able to hold western companies to higher ethical, legal, and environmental standards and not risk competitiveness.

That there is a whole lot of people right now who insist on doing above and still somehow praise China at every turn is something historians or news outlets will have to make sense of in some 5 years time.

Give up IP for end users and people will be pretty okay with giving up on IP for ai companies. You can't have different standards for special companies though.

why should western AI companies be held to different standards than Chinese ones? Neither of them are your buddy.