At the very least I imagine we could land a probe on one or even tether to it as a means of getting the probe going very fast before it even starts to use it's fuel

I have never liked the term "Artificial Intelligence" as it's become commonly used because it's really not true. AI is nothing more than a few complex algorithms layered on top of each other. The black box you speak of is simply the general inability of humans to intuit why the combination of algorithms, given a set of data produced a certain result. Think of AI as programming where the results are non specific. I watched a video the other day where someone wrote a language model and trained it for 24 hours on only the works of Shakespeare and it used it's algorithms and fancy maths to try and predict what the next word should be to sound the most like it's training data. That is non specific. Specific programming would be taking the works of Shakespeare and splitting out every sentence, and writing a function that chose 3 random sentences and output them as a "new" paragraph.

I also saw a video where someone trained a language model on the whole of 4chan to create bots for a short time and it was exceedingly convincing.