american ai companies are hypocrites on that front. they want copyright to not exist when it's them using copyrighted material, but afterwards they fight tooth and nail to enforce their own.

otherwise there is no moat and all that fortune that you envision them spending on anti-IP lobbying would not exist in the first place.

Yep. Now that they've bootstrapped their businesses on 'Free IP', they're happy to pull up the ladder to stop new competition from having the same advantage. While they don't like paying IP lawsuit settlements of a few billion here and there, AI leaders can raise gobs of capital now and the silver-lining is those settlements are setting a high barrier to entry.