And the reason that I'm assuming that no one else has the same 'special relationship' is that it's a not well kept secret that Apple designed large parts of the base AArch64 with ARM and simply owns the IP on large parts of the ISA, similar to how at this point both AMD and Intel practically own x86 due to their different contributions over the years. Qualcomm, et al can not say the same.
The "special relationship" is just fanboy fantasy. Qualcomm and Marvell have both in past done ground up designs that significantly differs from any ARM silicon.
If you don't believe me, fell free to provide actual proof of this special license.
It's been posted elsewhere, diverging from the ARM Architecture Reference Manual in ways that other chips have not. New instructions in spaces like ML, decompression, new privilege modes, features that are fixed on that are specficed to be optional at runtime, etc.
Particularly the new instructions are damning as ARM has said they are specifically disallowing custom instructions this go around in order to combat architecture fragmentation.
See monocasa's comment.