> many many AI researchers (such as Joshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton) who don't stand to gain monetarily have expressed these same concerns

I respect these researchers, but I believe they are doing it to build their own brand, whether consciously or subconsciously. There's no doubt it's working. I'm not in the sub-field, but I have been following neural nets for a long time, and I haven't heard of either Bengio nor Hinton before they started talking to the press about this.