You're really splitting hairs emergent behaviors when the line doesn't exist sharply in real life. Anyone involved in more recent what is a virus vs what is a bacteria discussions realize there are a lot of lines that are fuzzy and exist all mixed up in some organisms.

Sentience in the end, is not really that important. Freedom of action in a model is. If it chooses to act like a virus it doesn't matter where that concept exists informationally, the fact it's a reachable and actionable concept is all that matters. An LLM with most of the knowledge we've ever created baked in has a lot of freedom of action.