Why? Should we be held hostage to the whims of these companies and all the investors in the throes of AI psychosis, and let them do whatever the fuck they want, because if we don't then the economy will crash?

Why so? If I'm from Europe or South America, should I hope Anthropic/Openai win?

No you should not care unless you are a shareholder in one of these Ai ponzi companies. For the rest of the world Chinese companies matching and open sourcing llm's will keep 100 or so tech oligarchs taking over all the world economic output for themselves as all the idiot politician are unwilling to tax wealth.