The safe business won’t hold very long if someone can gain a short term business advantage with unsafe AI. Eventually government has to step in with a legal and enforcement framework to prevent greed from ruining things.
This is not even that far-fetched. A safe AI that you can trust should be far more useful and economically valuable than an unsafe AI that you cannot trust. AI systems today aren't powerful enough for the difference to really matter yet, because present AI systems are mostly not yet acting as fully autonomous agents having a tangible impact on the world around them.
While this might be true for the governments you have personally experienced, this is far from being an aphorism.
But participation would be voluntary, and the restriction of harmful behavior would apply to it's enemies, not its citizens. So I'm not quite sure what the problem is.
If only enough individuals are willing to buy these services, then again we all will bear the consequences. There is no way out of this where libertarian ideals can be used to come to a safe result. What makes this even a more wicked problem is that decisions made in other countries will affect us all as well, we can’t isolate ourselves from AI policies made in China for example.
will China obey US regoolations? will Russia?