Who will give them the compute? It requires million dollar clusters to make any progress.

Willingly? I wouldn't know. But then it becomespre a problem of obfuscation doesn't it?

There's a huge amount of money in AI, and there is no global organisation tracking GPUs and making sure that "X startup which purchased a bunch of GPUs then went bankrupt and sold them all to an unknown buyer" doesn't happen. Even stopping China from getting GPUs is proving extremely difficult and that's much, much more powerful actors than even the largest copyright cartel; NVIDIA is chafing even against that. GPU restrictions aren't going to work unless they're being enforced by the US military, and even then China is only ~5-10 years behind the US in fab tech and could easily custom build chips for AI to fill the demand, in the internal market if nothing else.

Basically, there is a lot of money to be made in AI, and if money is available to fund development it will not be that difficult to turn that money into compute, particularly in a context where the current huge "legitimate" buyers like Microsoft, Amazon, Google are banned from using AI chips for AI.