It's still a different situation. In the example provided it seems like the car companies lobbied to make it a law that the "pedestrians" were at fault if they were hit for "jaywalking", thus absolving responsibility for pedestrian safety.

The equivalent to the "AI companies" pitch would've been the car companies lobbying to make cars much safer therefore raising the bar for competitors to join the market. Like if Henry Ford was the only person to own the patent for air bags and then lobbied hard to regulate that every car shipped with one.