Nuclear technology is tricky to get working even if you have decent scientists and all the published research about basic principles. For current ML tech, a big point is that the core techniques are really simple, the simple textbook methods work at large scale, you don't necessarily need any special sauce which could be restricted. Yes, there is a lot of engineering work that goes into a full system to scale it efficiently, but all of that can be replicated by any decent bunch of engineers, unlike nuclear weapons.
The cat is out of the bag; you can't put the genie back in the bottle, all the "sensitive knowledge" you'd need to restrict AI is already known by at least a few CS undergrads in every single university in the world.
A given AI, once created, is "just" data. It can be sent around the world and run on commodity hardware. Nothing special needed beyond the expertise that created it in the first place.
Think of how relatively easy it is to clamp down on bioweapons, and compare that with our ability to stop malware.
Certainly the models and weights that have been released publicly are out in the wild and near impossible to retract. That damage is done.