So we're still at the argument that they weren't able to impress the world with how awesome their technology is, so instead they're going to try to scare the trillions of dollars out of us so they can cover the trillions they're spending.
That's fine and I see that, but it's easy to handwave away things with unproven conspiracy theories.
What are the other possibilities? If we take all the negative news coming out of the AI sector at face value, what could the less conspiracy theory based explanations be?