Google suspends engineer who publicly claimed he interacted with a sentient AI bot

  • Alphabet has placed software engineer Blake Lemoine on paid leave on claims he breached confidentiality policies
  • Lemoine had told a newspaper that he concluded the Google AI he interacted with was a person

Google has put an engineer on paid leave after he claimed he encountered a sentient AI bot at work. Photo: Bloomberg

Blake Lemoine, a software engineer on Google’s artificial intelligence development team, has gone public with claims of encountering “sentient” AI on the company’s servers after he was suspended for sharing confidential information about the project with third parties.

The Alphabet unit placed the researcher on paid leave early last week on claims he breached the firm’s confidentiality policy, he said in a Medium post titled “May be fired soon for doing AI ethics work”.

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