Sounds like a fake excuse. Their partnering with the evil US Government lapdogs like Microsoft, makes me think the concern was less about technology progression and more about intended unethical application of the technology.

This heavily falls on my preconceived assumptions though:

I suspect machine learning and AI have been used to subvert democracies for more than a decade already and what we are being shown of AI, now, is 15 or 20 year old technology, which has simply been retooled for, less public manipulation/democracy control (foreign and domestic), and skewed more towards public consumption. We'll give you a small bit of our technology, but only after we have used it to oppress you for 20 years or so. This is the general governmental pattern (whom takes control of all new technology with security implications).