> "And by the way if you did it in Britain and no one else did it, you would basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight."
This is important to keep in mind. There are competing AI R&D orgs in dozens of different countries, not just America, China and France.
This "logic" that you need to do obviously illegal stuff (under current legislation) because otherwise someone else would do it and take the loot from that raid remains highly questionable no matter what country you put in that placeholder.
The same "logic" would for example dictate that you should dismiss patents as otherwise "someone in China" could do it before you. Somehow nobody would agree that this is a valid approach in that case…
If you’re the leader of a nation, that’s the reality you need to work within. I really don’t care, as someone responsible for 330 million souls, if everyone is pretty equally robbed to support the whole nation. That’s like… taxes, man.