Google terminated a top software engineer on Monday after the employee claimed that Google's AI chatbot had developed sentience.

Human resources informed Blake Lemoine on June 6 that he had violated the company's employee confidentiality policy, according to his account in The New York Times.

Lemoine said he was suspended after delivering documents to an unnamed senator. He said the records prove Google and its tech discriminated against religious groups.

LaMDA, which stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, was the subject of an interview Lemoine gave to The Washington Post on June 11 as part of his work at Google's Responsible AI group. This "breakthrough dialogue technology" is referred to as LaMDA by Google. Natural-sounding conversation is its primary objective.

However, Lemoine said in a Medium article that he was certain LaMDA had become conscious enough to count "as a person" and that the AI had stated it was a sentient being. Lemoine told The Times that he had been trying for months to get his bosses at Google to listen to him when he said that LaMDA has a soul.