I don't see it that way, but I'm sure from an American perspective that how it seems.
And there seems to be an an obvious advantage from my perspective to having an information vacuum that is not bound by any kind of copyright law.
If that’s good or bad is more of a matter of opinion.
Like all things, it’s about finding a balance. American, or any other, AI isn’t free from the global system which exists around us— capitalism.
People produce countless volumes of unpaid works of art and fiction purely for the joy of doing so; that's not going to change in future.
And although you were being flippant, yes, Chinese LLMs are bad actors.
If they were watered down, I wouldn't see any moral or ethical loss in that.
They don't mind sharing their work for free to individuals or hell, to a large group of individuals and even companies, but AIs really take it to a whole different level in their eyes.
Whether this is a trend that will accelerate or even make a dent in the grand scheme of things, who knows, but at least in my circle of friends a lot of people are against AI companies (which is basically == M$) being able to get away with their shenanigans.
I'm also far more amenable to dismissing copyright laws when there is no profit involved on the part of the violator. Copying a song from a friend's computer is whatever, but selling that song to others certainly feels a lot more wrong. It's not just that OpenAI is violating copyright, they are also making money off of it.
So it is not good when people use copyleft as a justification for copyright, given that its whole purpose was to destroy it.