Suppose you're Sam, the CEO of a company that spends a TON on customer service -- both customer/client-facing and internal HR processing and so on. Suppose Sam wants to automate those interactions.
Sam probably wants that automation to be very robust to abuse, and avoid entangling the company in any sort of nonsense -- legal, cultural, or otherwise. Do the job, do it well, and stay on script. Don't insult the customer. Take abuse with a smile in your face. You know, the sort of stuff that the human people doing those roles now are trained on and understand.
To the extent that Sam can get woke-y extraordinarily cheap faculty/phd students to do enthusiastic labor for his customer service automation by calling it "alignment" or "AI Safety", well, all the better!
Not sure what any of that has to do with whether Sam or his company supports the use of automated weaponry.
As for how faculty and students characterize this type of research? There are a few kinds o things going on, not least of which is ego. But the most important, from Sam's perspective, is "academia-washing". But using a university as his contractor and calling his contractors' junior employees "students", Sam gets to skirt the whole visa thing!!! This for the small price of a faculty member "academia-washing" his internal R&D problem statement.