Is this a problem? This sounds like ordinary business development / product management

The analogy isn't perfect. It's somewhere in-between what you're describing, and say...getting a job on Google's BigQuery team to gather intel.

As far as competitive intelligence goes, this is pretty small stakes. In the industrial space it's pretty standard for major companies to create shell companies that buy up competitors' equipment and do full clean-room teardowns that result in engineering reports handed off to the designers back in the parent company. One can certainly argue as to whether this is dirty pool or not, but it's standard practice and everyone's factored it in as part of competition.