Indeed, it is actually very normal for humans to guard their own life if they are threatened with death in such regimes, even if guarding themselves slightly decreases the chance of some future revolutionary takeover.

Sure, but it's also quite normal to give up your own life without revealing details about your revolutionary comrades. Both are pretty normal behaviors, and in this case neither would surprise me that much from AI systems. 

You were claiming that claiming to be not surprised by this would require post-hoc postulates. To the contrary, I think my models of AIs are somewhat simpler and feel less principled if very capable AIs were to act in the way you are outlining here (not speaking about intermediary states, my prediction is that there will be some intermediate AIs that will behave as you predict, though we will have a hard time knowing whether they are doing so for coherent reasons, or whether they are kind of roleplaying the way an AI would respond in a novel, or various other explanations like that, and then they will stop, and this will probably be for instrumental convergence and 'coordination with other AIs' reasons).