IMHO: when an emerging technology threatens the livelihoods of millions, it's responsible and ethical to step away from seeing this stuff through a purely competitive lens.

Out of the three big geographic players, the US and China are jockeying for "most performant" models (whatever that means) with two separate approaches; the EU is trying to develop models that work best within their privacy, human rights and labour rights frameworks and laws.

All of these have have merits, though arguably the US's (de-facto) strategy of market dominance at any cost with as few restraints as possible will be the worst for society at large. The prudent thing to do would be to first determine if this is something that will actually live up to the hype (which IMO is still very much in the air), and then if it does, turns this into an international collaboration rather than a competitive enterprise.

It's not lost on me that this is a terminally naive point of view.

You don't need to cap the technological process. You can simply curb the power of corrupt individuals. If anything it would accelerate progress.

Why did we knee cap CIA/NSA/DOD from nominally operating on Americans when the Soviet Union continued to push forward with it?

For what it's worth, our once-and-(hopefully)-future allies the European Union are already on board with reigning in the surveillance industry (leading by example, even). So your question is more like how can we constrain our domestic technological authoritarians when China continues to embrace theirs. And the answer is that it's not a "how". The "how" is straightforwardly enforcing longstanding concepts like personal information, antitrust bundling, unauthorized access (backdoors in sold products), etc. So your question comes down to more of a why, and the why is because it is in line with our values based around individual liberty.