> But that's not how the law sees it

Anthropic paid several billion dollars to settle a lawsuit they were likely to lose. OpenAI is now about to get taken to the cleaners for corporate espionage against Apple. They do not give a fuck about the law. Paying $5 billion for some fines is a trivial cost of doing business when you're aiming for trillion-dollar IPOs.

> make me think irrationally when it comes to whether or not these AI companies honor the terms they provide.

Irrationality is thinking there's such a thing as honor and that companies which have repeatedly broken the law for data won't do it again when there's no enforcement mechanism that acts as a real deterrent.

Their argument boils down to "they've done it once and nobody prevents them from doing it again"

This dog-and-pony-show is a rehash of the Pascal's wager we saw with smartphone security. Everyone thought it would be "corporate suicide" to hack an iPhone, but NSO Group did it. Apple sued NSO Group, and then settled out of court immediately after. Now we live in a post-hacking world and everyone pretends like this is an unavoidable necessary evil that corporations are powerless to stop. Suggesting litigation is a comically useless strategy because the law rubberstamps any form of useful surveillance or retention. Failing that, NSO Group has enough sycophant lobbyists to smear anyone that takes their threat seriously. Look at OpenAI and Anthropic and tell me that it's not the same hostage situation; can you?

You can do whatever stupid stuff you want to with your data. But this is an absurd amount of faith to give to guilty businesses, on the level of planning your world domination schemes over Skype.