Your description grants psychological characteristics like intelligence, will, and intent to the AI. The AI is an intelligent and willful agent that has some intent to take over the firm and is doing that by making strategic hiring decisions.

A different and externally/phenomenologically identical way to look at it is that the AI is just a program that generates output too unpredictable, too voluminous, or too idiosyncratic for people to evaluate. When people submit their own will and their own intent to that program, by treating the black box as an intelligent oracle, they've entered into a psychotic state divorced from reality.

It's two self-consistent and coherent perspectives of the same event, except one involves believing that scifi AI has arrived and the other just thinks people can be dangerously stupid and credulous.

> Your description grants psychological characteristics like intelligence, will, and intent to the AI.

The phrase “take over” doesn’t necessarily imply those things. Both of your descriptions is of a thing that took over a company.