It's hard evaluate this without a source but it's not that much of a stretch of the imagination to think it's possible.

Let's face it, AI can do a lot of stuff much more efficiently than any human ever will.

Some say AI bots are manipulating the markets right now. While I have no idea if that's the case it does seem plausible. We saw the banksters making moves on crypto last year and price surge around the same time, if they gained a big enough percentage of the market capitalization they could use AI bots to pump and dump and then buy it all back for pennies on the pound in the low cycles.