This seems a bit too cynical of a take to match what I've seen. I see mainly two distinct "AI can be dangerous" camps: the EA-adjacent camp centered around LessWrong and Eliezer Yudkowsky, and the anti-generative-art camp worried about the threat to artists' livelihoods. The latter seems to be the closest to wanting an outright ban on the technology despite not being anywhere near the capitalist class. The former seems to take the stance that "we NEED a plan, and no one seems to have one that plausibly works", and is calling for more research into such plans rather than stopping the technology itself (partly because they see stopping it as an impossible feat). It hardly seems like they're doing this out of fear of anything but actual catastrophe.