Even if the US federal government refuses to act, smaller government entities can deploy their own compute clusters running strong open-weights models like Kimi K3, and provide their own citizens with free access to strong AI models. There may come a time when even Chinese providers no longer release strong model weights, but then the previous generation of strong open-weights models can be used to accelerate the development of data pipelines and training setups to build the next generation. California or Australia (or many others) could fund university-led R&D efforts to build completely open models.
Despite the angry noises that leading providers make about their model outputs being used to train competing models, that's not illegal. States can use Common Crawl, Anna's Archive, Books3, commercial model outputs, and whatever other data sources that are useful for building models. States have sovereign immunity to ignore copyright complaints, if they decide to pursue model development.
The big AI companies don't have much of a moat. Let the big companies spend a fortune figuring out what works best, then openly build imitations having 95% of the capability at 5% of the cost.
AI is the least of the problem.
There's an inevitable effect that it has, and the only lever you have as an individual is being on the right side of that.