Google announced on Friday that it had fired a senior software developer who claimed that the company's artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot LaMDA was self-aware.

Last month, Google placed software employee Blake Lemoine on administrative leave for violating company policy and making "wholly unfounded" accusations regarding LaMDA.

Blake opted to continuously breach direct employment and data security regulations, including the requirement to protect product information, despite extended discussion on this matter, a Google spokeswoman told Reuters in an email.

Google stated a year ago that LaMDA - Language Model for Dialogue Applications - was based on the company's research demonstrating that Transformer-based language models trained on dialogue could learn to discuss virtually any topic.

Google and several prominent scientists refuted Lemoine's claims, stating that LaMDA is only a complicated algorithm designed to produce believable human language.

The dismissal of Lemoine was initially reported by the IT and society newsletter Big Technology.