This is really the central issue and where these AI fears come from. It's tech workers being too infatuated with intelligence and mistaking it for power. A society of disembodied AI's is just the platonic fantasy version of a tech company full of nerds, and nerds never have power regardless of how smart they are.
Anything that's digital is extremely feeble and runs on a substrate of physical stuff you can just throw out of the window, some AIs in the cloud won't defeat you for the same reason Google won't defeat the US army. The usual retort is something like "but you can't turn the internet off if you wanted to?!" to which the answer is yes you can actually, ask China.
Psychologically it's just equivalent to John Perry Barlow style cyberspace escape fantasies.