AI promises a lot of creative destruction. There are a plethora of historical examples where elites have restricted technological development because they thought it was a threat to the status quo and therefore their ability to extract wealth from that status quo.

For example: Queen Elizabeth refusing to grant a patent for the first knitting machine, the Qing dynasty forbidding large-scale ship building, or the Ottoman Empire outlawing the printing press.

I'm not sure that this is what is happening here, but it's occurrence is not impossible.