Whether or not they are US based entities I think is moot since several developers have already been booted from kernel development due to their affiliations largely at the behest of the US.

Also if they try prevent downloads it would have the interesting side affect that: all the folks out there seeding and torrenting Linux ISOs might have to now also claim they only share the un-embargoed ones, wink.

One great use I have found for ChatGPT and family is helping me divine command line one-liners for standard shell programs. Generating commands for tools like ffmpeg are also reasonably successful and saves a lot of time digging through man files