The intel and AMD case made more sense at the time because during the years the Dell bribes were going on, AMD launched Athlon/athlon 64 which was a better product than Intel which had launched Pentium 4 during that time. Intel would have likely bled significant more market share hences the bribes made sense for Intel.
Around the time these bribes stopped is when Intel launched core 2 duo, during which time, the bribes were not necessary since Intel had a superior product at the time. Everyone wanted to put Intel in their systems during this time. Intel's core 2 duo lineup annihilated AMD's product stack, The bribes and their timing made sense.
With a 400mm2 4nm, 8192 shader chip with a 256bit bus, Battlemage does not sound like an spec monster when looking at the current performance of the 4096 shader A770. The scaling between A380 to A770 is already showing scaling issues so with it's rumors specs, Nvidia does not have much to worry about and AMD with their chiplet design can do well with price drops. Also with prices for cards plummeting as much as they are at the moment, Intel is going to be launching their card in a pricing environment where they are selling at or below cost again. This is not good for partners or Intel. With intel's history with discrete graphics and Intel aggressively cutting projects and divisions as of late, if I was a board partner, I would be wary of selling Intel graphics. It why this rumor does not make sense and seems like something made up to take attention away from the AMD DLSS controversy at the moment.
Intel blocking AMD made sense when we compare Athlon 64 vs Pentium 4. Nvidia blocking Intel based on the performance of ARC vs Amphere/Lovelace/Blackwell seems irrational.