I mean, the AI companies want it this way, but the same laws of information apply to them too. They can patent whatever they want, but as we see other nations use their models to distill information to other models with almost nothing they can do about it.

Patents, copyright, lawsuits are all post ad hoc actions which mean the milk has already been stolen. And it only works if the rule of law is something that is respected, that's not going so well lately.

We are seeing this in that there is little to no moat between the models, nearly everyone with the needed compute seems to catch up pretty quickly. And when said rivalries cross national boarders the only solution to these problems quickly becomes violence.

With how information works AI wins this game in the long run. Individual humans scale poorly and their ability to individually acquire information is a slow process. Looking at this on a company by company basis is not the proper way to show how the future with models is going to play out.