Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if this was a conspiracy to crash the "west" AI labs. Might as well pop the AI bubble and see the USA economy go down the drain. Even if not orchestrated, I am sure they see how they could benefit from that outcome.

Now, all this talk of pacing the frontier obviously means that they are afraid of the competition. It could be the open models eating their margins, but also competing frontier models forcing them to invest more and more for diminishing returns, just to keep up. They would certainly benefit from a "Moore's Law" roadmap to pace the advances, and seeing that they lobby for US laws, it would probably mean they are more worried about increasing spending. Though outlawing both open models and Chinese models would be good for their bottom line as well.