A Google engineer claimed the company's AI chatbot was sentient. Then Google suspended him.

The senior software engineer at the company was suspended on Monday for making a false claim.

The company's human resources team told Lemoine that he had violated their employee confidentiality policy and that he was placed on leave.

Lemoine told The Times that he was suspended after handing over documents. According to the outlet, he said that the documents contained evidence that the tech giant has been involved in discrimination.

Lemoine told The Washington Post that he had begun chatting with LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, as part of his role at the Responsible Artificial Intelligence department. LaMDA is intended to be able to hold realistic conversations with people.

Lemoine stated in a Medium post that he was certain that LaMDA had gained enough consciousness to be considered a person. Lemoine told The Times that he had been trying to get the attention of his superiors at the search engine company.

Lemoine said in a Medium post that he had found LaMDA to be "credibly consistent in its communications about what it wants and what it believes its rights are as a person." He said it would cost nothing to give LaMDA what it wants.

It wants head pats. It likes being told at the end of a conversation whether it did a good job or not so that it can learn how to help people better in the future.

In a Medium post on June 7th, Lemoine stated that he believed that people were suspended in order to be fired.

When they decide to fire someone but don't have their legal ducks in a row, it happens. They will pay you for a few more weeks and then give you a decision which they have already made.

Lemoine said that he had provided a list of all the people outside of the company with whom he had discussed LaMDA, including those who worked for the US government.

The public has a right to know how irresponsible this corporation is being with one of the most powerful information access tools ever invented. If they allow me to do it in the future, I will be proud of all of the hard work I've done for the company. I will not allow them to hide their irresponsibility.

The Times and The Post received a statement from a person who said that the evidence does not support Lemoine's allegations.

Lemoine didn't reply to Insider's requests for comment.