>I personally know multiple people doing this full time at large tech companies.

The failure mode of internal "ethical" control at private enterprises is well-known and has already played out (at least) once when we tried to regulate medical experiments in the 2 decades after WW2. I personally consider the current AI safety positions to be just blatant whitewashing. The lemoine fiasco is a specifically hilarious case in point combining both a) a person that is utterly incompetent and biased to work at that position and b) total failure of leadership to adequately engage with an issue (or even admit it's possible in principle). At the current point, AI safety is roughly as useful as tobacco lobbying (exaggerated for effect).