> there is some sort of "goal" in AI development that, if realized, would effectively make it a superweapon.

None of the AI labs have been shown to have any sort of significant research lead over any of the others.

So if progress does eventually lead to a singularity event and an ASI super-weapon, there's no reason to believe that once the first lab hits that threshold, every other lab won't also hit that threshold independently within weeks/months of each other.

...unless the first group to make it there literally intends to murder everyone else working in the space as soon as they hit the (otherwise not-so-singular) singularity.

And if that's the plan, well that's not very nice.