In the US, Google suspended an engineer who contended that LaMDA, an AI chatbot the company developed, had become sentient, telling him that he had violated the company's confidentiality policy after dismissing his claims. Blake Lemoine, a software engineer at Alphabet Inc.'s Google, said he believed that its Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) is a person who has rights and might well have a soul. LaMDA is an internal system for building chatbots that mimic speech.