The difference is that, AFAIK, those bigger AI crawlers do respect robots.txt. Google even provides a way to opt-out of AI training without opting-out of search indexing.
possibly unpopular opinion, I trust the bigger companies more than small ones on stuff like this. It would be so much easier to not offer anything, rather than intentionally create a potemkin setting and risk the blowback that would occur if discovered. Hopefully this comment does not age poorly.
full disclosure: worked there [edit: google] a while ago, not in search, not in AI.
I'm a bit in a hurry, don't have time for close reading. Does that article say some Google apps (notably Maps) store locations on your device even if you have configured them to not store it in your Google account? I may miss something, don't have time to read between the lines today.