AI Safety hasn't been divorced from tech companies, at least not from Deepmind, OpenAI, and Anthropic. They were all founded by people who said explicitly that AGI will probably mean the end of human civilization as we know it.

All three of them have also hired heavily from the academic AI safety researcher pool. Whether they ultimately make costly sacrifices in the name of safety remains to be seen (although Anthropic did this already when they delayed the release of Claude until after ChatGPT came out). But they're not exactly "watching from the sidelines", except for Google and Meta.