I always suspect they have the most to lose if legal decisions on copyright issues don't go their way.

Imagine a scenario (theoretically possible but increasingly unlikely) where a US court decides that using "pirated" copyright data to train models is illegal. Now the AI developer has invested hundreds of billions of capital into a thing that is declared illegal and has to be scrapped.

This risk affects existing megacorps more than "startups" like OpenAI and Anthropic (and Chinese companies), because the megacorps have much more to lose. They actually have the cash to pay damages if the flood of copyright claims arrive at the door. This will not only bomb their AI development, but also the rest of their established businesses as well.

And thus I strongly suspect legal issues are holding them back a bit. Megacorps want to win the AI race, but not to the extent they stake the rest of their established business, while the newer companies' only product is AI, so they have to go all in.

Notice for example how Meta's Llama performed much more poorly after they got smacked by a bunch of lawsuits claiming that they torrented a bunch of copyright data.

(Disclaimer: I'm an outsider and everything I base my speculations on is public knowledge.)

they, rightfully so, have no faith in LLMs.

That plus they don’t distill so they have worse RL examples.