The article says: "Notice that classic regulatory capture [...] happens in the shadows, in the backrooms, away from the public’s eye. As Culpepper argues in Quiet Politics and Business Power, business power goes down as political salience goes up."

Regulatory capture tends to happen "at the end" because the industry is no longer in the public eye. AI is set to be in the public eye for the forseeable future.

People are way too willing to believe half-baked conspiracy theories which they cooked up in 30 seconds. The default presumption should be that labs are seeking the policies they are requesting, e.g. https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier It's true that there has been discussion of open weight models in the past, but that hasn't been the focus of discussion recently.