The Taliban analogy also works the other way (which I invoked earlier up in this thread). It shows that a small group with modest resources can still inflict disproportionate large scale damage.

The point is that it is incredible difficult to reliably control humans, even for humans who have been fine-tuned to do so by evolution.

There's some wiggle room in 'reliably control', but plain old money goes pretty far. An AI group only needs a certain amount of initial help from human infrastructure, namely to the point where it can develop reasonably self-sufficient foundries/data centers/colonies. The interactions could be entirely cooperative or benevolent up until some later turning point. The scenario from the Animatrix comes to mind.