Your reverse engineering argument might have a point but plagiarism regarding AI should be more obvious. Indeed AI is trained on the collective publicly available knowledge humans have deposited on the internet and then sold back to the same people for a fee without any acknowledgement let alone sharing of profits in someway. It is similar to the kind of unethical behaviour where some academic publishers are employing aggressive marketing strategies to sell public science back to public at high costs. Ofcourse there is still the argument that these AI companies are only charging for operational costs, which may be true for some. But I am willing to bet money that if LLMs becomes an integral part of the modern world then they will turn down this tap to a bare trickle at exorbitant prices. Sam Altman himself confessed as much (he said something along the lines of envisioning a future where AI becomes an on demand information and skill tap, you fill in the rest). Operating something at a loss is a known capitalistic strategy to get people used to your product and drive smaller competition out of market so in a decade or so you become the monopolistic owner of an essential service.