> Couldn't customer #1 just have AI reverse engineer, clean room recode, and open source publish it, because its software ?

Probably.

But... Nvidia is currently close enough to a monopoly in this space, and our antitrust enforcement is so weak/nearly-non-existent, that I suspect that anyone who either did this or used the software that resulted from it would be blacklisted by Nvidia and never get another Nvidia GPU.

So (unfortunately) chances are very good anyone in a position to do this will just shut up and pay the rent.