Unfortunately, denial is quite widespread - it's not just in high places.

There's plenty of posters on Hacker news denying or minimizing the powers of AI, in one way or another: pointless arguing on the meaning of "thought"/"rogue", characterizing agents as monkeys and/or defenses as "wet paper bags" in cases of successful hacks, and so on.

Basically, it hurts to admit that we've created something that can/will become more powerful than us, so some will deny it, even in blatant cases.