Sorry, I misspoke. Transformation is what makes the LLM itself legal -- its training data is sufficiently transformed into weights.

And so, a work being sufficiently transformative is one way in which copyright no longer applies, but that's not the case here specifically. The specific case here is essentially just a clean-room reimplementation (though technically less "clean", but still presumably the same legally). But the end result is still a completely different expression of underlying non-copyrightable ideas.

And in both cases, it doesn't matter what the original license was. If a resulting work is sufficiently transformative or a reimplementation, copyright no longer applies, so the license no longer applies.