If we want AI "safety", whatever that means, we need regulators and enforcement. Without it, I'll assume it's decoration.
That is not to say that Hinton, Sutskever and others aren't genuinely concerned about AI safety. But I doubt that is the reason why the big names are paying lots of random nobodies to pretend to care about AI safety, because frankly, I do not see how they can output anything of use in a possible AGI future.
Actual customer support by humans being replaced by AI is also something that warrants at least investigations - if not for the protection of one of the last classes of low-skill employment, mismanagement of support has been a thing for so long, "submit your complaint on Hacker News" is a meme.
This is patently false. To have regulations and regulators, all you need to have is concrete specifications of what outcomes you want to avoid and what exactly to check.
For example, are you using personally identifiable information to train your models? Oh you are? Well, you should not. And you should prove that you aren't by tracking provenance of your training data.
See? That's verifiable, actionable, and enforceable. The things that regulators track.
Also quite important: the role of a regulator is to review what and how to regulate.
Unless you are cough partially defining AI safety as privacy and data ownership. Which is my point.
Your assumption is uninformed and patently wrong. One of the primary concerns of AI safety is surveillance.