Yes this seems most likely. Regulatory capture, essentially, if they can get legislation made around this. Also serves as a convenient way/reason to stop training new models ($$$) by calling for a slowdown.
Apart from South Africa (which gave up its nukes voluntarily), the other contenders were basically only held back due to military intervention (Iraq, Libya, Syria) or economic sanctions (Iran).
I'll note that, if it is true, the only other alternative is to ensure liability is held by whoever trained and/or provided the inference for the damage done by the model. This would effectively shut down open-weight models anyway.
To an extent, yes. For example, aircraft: one can say something broadly true like "it is important that planes do not fall out of the sky" while also calling for not-strictly-necessary regulations that happen to support your own business like "we need to be able to inspect factories at any time for compliance, so the factories must be local to our nation".