When individual copyright violations are considered "theft" by the law (and the RIAA and the MPAA), violating copyrights of billions of private people to generate profit, is absolutely stealing. While the former arguably is arguably often a measure of self defense against extortion by copyright holding for-profit enterprises.

They used copyrighted works without permission

Right, it's only stolen when regular people use copyright material without permission

But when OpenAI downloads a car, it's all cool baby