Humans and Computers are 2 wholly separate entities, and there's 0 reason for us to conflate the two. I don't care if another human looks at my code and straight up copies/pastes it, I care very much if an entity backed by a megacorp like Micro$oft does the same, en-masse, and sells it for profit, however.
However, on the other hand we also have the scale at which they learn, which kind of makes every individual source line of code they learn from pretty unimportant. Learning at this scale is statistical process, and in most cases individual source snippets diminish in the aggregation of millions of others.
Or to put it the other way round, the actual value lies in the effort of collecting the samples, training the models, creating the software required for the whole process, putting everything into a good product and selling it. Again, in my mind, the importance of every individual source repo is too small at this scale to care about their license.
That is a fear for companies because the individual source snippets and the knowledge "learned" from them is seen as a competitive advantage of which the sources are an integral part - and I think this is a fair point from their side. However then the exact same argument should apply in favour of paying the artists, writers, coders etc whose work has been used to train these models.
So it sounds like they are trying to have their cake and eat it too.
Because what companies want to hide are usually secrets, that are available to (nearly) no one outside of the company. It’s about preventing accidental disclosure.
What AIs are trained on, on the other hand, is publicly available data.
To be clear: what could leak accidentally would have value of course. But here it’s about the single important fact that gets public although it shouldn’t, vs. the billions of pieces from which the trained AI emerges.