I can’t answer all of your questions, but why is it inconceivable that an AI could practice ransomware to gain cryptocurrency? There’s no reason it needs to explain to company or hospital or government agency being attacked that it’s an AI.

We already know that some institutions pay these ransoms.

I'm not saying AI won't ransomware us; I'm saying that hackers+AI will do a better job of ransomewaring us than just AI. You could argue that the unreleased/secretly-RSI-capable model is a super-duper hacker that don't need no man to tell it how to super-hack. All I know is that humans still have alpha, and as persistant as AIs are, professionals still managed to find CVEs in curl even after being audited by Mythos https://aisle.com/blog/aisle-discovers-6-new-cves-in-curl-in...

Will this be true into the future? Who knows?! But the low-hanging fruit will be harvested by your ordinary ransomware gangs, and newly born/escaped AI won't find much low-hanging fruit.