No, it actually is much older.

https://extropians.weidai.com/extropians/0303/4140.html is Yudowsky inventing the specter of a paperclip maximizer as a potential problem about 20 years ago.

He was, of course, the moving force behind both LessWrong and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Intelligence_Research_.... Both of which formed one of the three strands that later merged into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism.

Yudkowsky has been warning about ai x risk for a very long time. I guess you could say the “halt all research” rhetoric from him is more recent, but I can’t say it’s surprising giving his long standing views.