This is a bit outdated. Some of the young people described in the article actually became top researchers, engineers, and managers in AI companies, and their beliefs are used as a justification for the potential regulatory capture and geopolitical games. They also have a massive conflict of interest: AI will play a huge role in your life in the upcoming years whether you want it or not, and they will control it. So of course it's easier to talk about the ominous and vague science fiction threat (regardless of whether they still believe it), rather than the threat that these people already pose to everyone else. See Leopold Aschenbrenner's essay [0] as an example, and note how he's talking about the "free" vs "authoritarian" world while simultaneously advocating for locking everything down in the "free" world.

[0] https://situational-awareness.ai/