If a megafarm hires you to write papers for the Ethical Milk Production team, any modicum of social awareness will tell you that they don’t actually want you to write a paper about the ethics of animal products.
If you, a large corproation working in AI, hire a prominent and vocal AI ethicist, any modicum of awareness should tell you that they may actually have a sense of ethics.
True - though I’m guessing there are a lot more vocal ethicists who will tone it down for money, than there are large AI corps who are actually willing to be honest about AI ethics! Anyway, sounds like it was a bad fit all round for both parties and this was the only possible outcome long-term.
Except corporations do not have awareness, because they are machines.
But if that megafarm says "We believe that AI should: 1. Be socially beneficial." then we can point to that when their behaviour is not consistent with it, no?
Once you conclude they were just using you for good PR, what is your recourse (aside from compromising your ethics)? Bad PR.
There are a lot of research resources - compute, tools, data - you can't access from academia. The action in AI is in industry, as AI needs data and industry has it.