By the time you have AIs capable of doing substantial work on AI r&d, they will also be able to contribute effectively to alignment research (including, presumably, secret self-alignment).
Even if takeoff is harder than alignment, that problem becomes apparent at the point where the amount of AI labor available to work on those problems begins to explode, so it might still happen quickly from a calendar perspective.
By the time you have AIs capable of doing substantial work on AI r&d, they will also be able to contribute effectively to alignment research (including, presumably, secret self-alignment).
Even if takeoff is harder than alignment, that problem becomes apparent at the point where the amount of AI labor available to work on those problems begins to explode, so it might still happen quickly from a calendar perspective.