I have a different intuition here; I would much prefer the alignment team at e.g. DeepMind to be working at DeepMind as opposed to doing their work for some “alignment-only” outfit. My guess is that there is a non-negligible influence that an alignment team can have on a capabilities org in the form of:
The alignment team interacting with other staff either casually in the office or by e.g. running internal workshops open to all staff (like DeepMind apparently do)
The org consulting with the alignment team (e.g. before releasing models or starting dangerous projects)
Staff working on raw capabilities having somewhere easy to go if they want to shift to alignment work
I think the above benefits likely outweigh the impact of the influence in the other direction (such as the value drift from having economic or social incentives linked to capabilities work)
Nice list!
Conditioned on the future containing AIs that are capable of suffering in a morally relevant way, interpretability work may also help identify and even reduce this suffering (and/or increase pleasure and happiness). While this may not directly reduce x-risk, it is a motivator for people taken in by arguments on s-risks from sentient AIs to work on/advocate for interpretability research.