If that’s the reality, you would think that employees would be willing to break an NDA for it. “We’re all going to die, but I really need my bonus this year” seems like a parody rather than a real strongly held position.

If anything this points to a more moderate (but still bad) worry among the employees.

That's sci-fi. They cannot "recursively improve". There is no magic to LLMs. An agent swarm can increase it's thinking power by increasing the number of agents, the thinking time and by changing the base model to a more powerful one. So at worst they can assign themselves more compute or hijack another agent swarm based on a more powerful model.