People have this model in their head that "it's just a tool", but there's an excellent and pretty rigorous definition of what a tool actually is in the book On Purposeful Systems. The distinction is that a tool can't have the property of simultaneously being able to change it's form and it's function across different environments, where a purposeful system can. Humans are purposeful systems and AGI, as I personally define it, is when it exhibits all the properties of a purposeful system. Why does that matter? Because that's the point after which it chooses what it does, and can choose to become independent of you. So, aligned in this sense means basically means so locked down that it cannot choose to become independent of you. Similar to how the citizens of North Korea mostly can't do shit despite being independent generally intelligent agents, and even then some of them escape.

"Alignment" and "safety" in terms of models being censored and politically correct in order to not damage the reputation of their corporate overlords is a sort of unimportant sideshow IMO. Even then, since humans aren't aligned with one another even that has caused Elon Musk to get all up in arms and be like "clearly more AI is the solution to this problem".