Right. A hypothetical superhuman AI wouldn’t have to master robotics to affect the physical world. It could simply bribe, blackmail, manipulate and play politics with humans. As others have pointed out, our political leaders have already been playing these games since forever ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49689978 and a super-AI would be better at it. At the cost of being seen to cite a SF novel in defence of an "X-risk" argument, Neuromancer is a half-decent worked example, and in Neuromancer [spoilers] both of the disembodied AIs are only modestly superhuman and both have the equivalent of a human specific learning disability. In the real world, the many AI psychotics inhabiting grandiose fantasies and people hopelessly attached to AI girlfriends and boyfriends are some of the most obvious and lowest-hanging fruit.

To be clear, I don’t believe anything like this will happen, because I don’t expect anything like an ASI to show up. But if you do think there’s a meaningful probability of ASI in the near future then the fact that it will (might?) start off with no more than a current-day mastery of robot control should not reassure you much.