I get the sense that they're trying to manufacture the AI narratives of the 80s so they get to control the story when it happens. My semi conspiracy theory is that anthropics biology wet lab is also going to lead to some kind of AI manufactured bio event (which anthropic said they predicted will happen in a few years).

This may be a bit backwards. Many of the classic sci-fi AI issues are just natural laws in evolutionary systems. A generic learning system will have particular behaviors if we want them to be useful.