"What if an oil research company doesn't want to be a supervillain or do bad things but they (or their investors) decide it's safer to just do the research in a jurisdiction where they face less risk of being subjected to regulatory burden especially during the early exploratory stage."
This kind of "externality washing" is talked about as though it were some kind of amoral or practical business matter separate from ethical decisions, rather than an explicit attempt to avoid responsibility for the community that you are moving into.
That is to say, organizations look for economic areas that do not have power structures that will scrutinize, push back or otherwise enforce community social standards on said organizations. Capital will always find a downtrodden population to exploit for it's own development BECAUSE they do not have other protections.
What if an AI research company doesn't want to be a supervillain or do bad things but they (or their investors) decide it's safer to just do the research in a jurisdiction where they face less risk of being subjected to regulatory burden especially during the early exploratory stage. Surely they'll care about abiding to the rules of one of the major world's markets, but they'll so it after they have a mature product.
At least that's how I interpreted GP's comment. EU will eventually get the product that confirms to the safety specifications that we all agree they should, but it will be a foreign product.