intellectual property doesn't really exist in most of the world. they don't give a shit about it in india, bangladesh, vietnam, china, the philippines, malaysia, singapore...
it's arbitrary law that is designed to protect corporations and it's generally unenforceable.
There are many AI development happening in China. Doubao (from Bytedance, the same company behind TikTok), DeepSeek and Qwen are some examples of Chinese LLMs.