It's still a different situation. In the example provided it seems like the car companies lobbied to make it a law that the "pedestrians" were at fault if they were hit for "jaywalking", thus absolving responsibility for pedestrian safety.

The equivalent to the "AI companies" pitch would've been the car companies lobbying to make cars much safer therefore raising the bar for competitors to join the market. Like if Henry Ford was the only person to own the patent for air bags and then lobbied hard to regulate that every car shipped with one.

I think this is too generous of an interpretation of OpenAI's and Anthropic's position. the 'slow down' mandate is not a real regulatory standard - policies are generally crafted based on good vs bad outcomes, not speed-of-development. the drive for this kind of specific, toothless regulation is done at the behest of large corporations looking at open-weight models eating their cake and realizing that any small player could now do so too if they had the compute backing them (places like Canopy Wave, for eg)

that it also serves as marketing material for just how capable their models are is just a cherry on top, I suppose