Exactly. "Guardrails" are already ill-defined, so it's more than likely that a few companies (with lawyers) can say "we have them, China and small businesses don't."
OpenAI/Anthropic might as well say they're the only companies operating with benevolent invisible wizards, and nobody else is.
I find it kind of funny that this is where you draw the line. First off, I don't think calling AI a tool is particularly accurate because it's trivially easy to control/predict the output of a tool, but you can't control the output of an AI. You're just losing a little more control here with their decision.