I believe that is a claim made in the time domain rather than the capability domain.

Obviously claims of the future are going to be speculative.

I don't think anyone credible is claiming to know the extent to which models that exist today are sentient. People have stated their opinions on what they might be.

There are a few non serious claims, but I'm not hedging too much with the conditional of credible. There's probably someone out there who would claim LLMs are made of milk. I'm limiting credible to researchers in the field, who have divergent beliefs on what might be happening, but are generally in agreement of what we know is happening.