The difference is the asymmetry of the potential warfare we're talking about here.
Committing physical, in-person crimes anonymously has obviously always been possible: there are unsolved murders, thefts, and other crimes every day. But they require a great deal of personal risk to the criminal because the criminal has to physically put themselves into the act of committing the crime, along the path of getting to where the crime is, and has to face an opponent, if their crime is against another person.
Now, that can be sourced remotely, routed through anonymizing tools, VPNs, etc., and do a great deal to cover their tracks so that the "pretty good chance they go to jail" can be substantively minimized in a way we couldn't previously contemplate.
The idea that we should let the US based models be permissive because at least they'll be subject to subpoena power is fatuous: yes, strictly speaking, a user committing crimes on a permissive foreign model will be harder to catch, but non-sophisticated users who have never heard of hugging face may find that being blocked by the US model is enough for them to reconsider their behavior. A dedicated enough individual is going to commit the crime they're going to commit, but there are tons of situations where preventing trivial access to tools that can be used for malice can actually prevent malice from occurring.