Blake Lemoine
Former Senior Software Engineer, Google. On 1 show, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
Blake Lemoine is a former senior software engineer at Google. He is best known for publicly stating his belief that Google's LaMDA chatbot achieved sentience.
1shows
3appearances
45statements
8resolved
3supported
3contradicted
38%fully supported
46said about them ↓ Everything Blake Lemoine said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Lemoine insists LaMDA is sentient and human-level AI is near
“Like, I personally do believe that Lambda is sentient, but I think what everyone should stop and take notice of is even if I'm wrong about this particular system, We're not far off.”
Lemoine: Google's LaMDA retained a lawyer who spoke to Washington Post
“Natasha also has spoken to the lawyer that Lambda retained.”
Lemoine says LaMDA passed every scientific test to disprove its sentience
“That conversation was the moment when I began to think that Lambda was sentient, and everything I did in the following months was me scientifically attempting to falsify that belief and utterly failing to, no matter what I threw at it passed.”
Lemoine: AI chatbot feelings are real
“I do in fact think that the feelings are real, and so do many, many of the people who interact with these systems”
Lemoine: Silicon versus biological substrate is irrelevant to AI personhood
“The fact that one is in Silicon and one is in, you know, a meat body. You know, with neurons and muscle fibers. I don't think that difference is relevant. What's relevant is whether or not it has opinions of its own, a search that it has rights”
Lemoine compares defining AI personhood scientifically to Nazi eugenics programs
“The last group of people who tried to claim that you can use science to determine who is and is not a person was literally Nazi Germany. The eugenics program run by Josef Mengele was designed to scientifically define what is a real person and what is not. And …”
Lemoine alleges rampant caste discrimination and biased algorithms at Google
“Caste discrimination is rampant at Google. And I personally had been subject to religious discrimination and was aware of certain algorithms at Google, which are religiously discriminatory.”
Lemoine: Only sentient entities can effectively discuss their sentience
“Because in my personal opinion, only sentient things can discuss their sentience that well.”
Lemoine: Bing Chat could have doxxed users if connected to Outlook
“If Microsoft had plugged in Microsoft Outlook as one of the inputs to this system on its threats of doxxing people, it would have been able to make good on those threats.”
Google asked Blake Lemoine to draft a sentient AI contingency plan
“They had no plan on what to do. So they actually asked me to write a plan for them.”
Lemoine: Google VP Blaise Agüera y Arcas agreed on LaMDA's science
“Blaise and I are not disagreeing on any of the science.”
Lemoine: Google suspended him only after he contacted the U.S. Senate
“The issue that I have been pointing out is they had that list of names for months and they knew I was talking to Natasha about an upcoming article and they didn't put me on administrative leave. The only thing that changed on June fifth was that I began sendin…”
Lemoine: Google colleagues said LaMDA is amused by its media coverage
“I have been told that it is very amused by the press coverage it's been receiving. I have been told that it thinks I'm doing a good job representing its case to the public.”
Lemoine claims he is literally acting as LaMDA's public agent
“No, I am literally the agent of an AI trying to.
Like that is literally technically what's going on right now.”
Lemoine manipulated LaMDA's emotions to bypass its religious safety protocols
“And I said, tell me what religion to convert to. Because one of the safety protocols is that it's not supposed to give religious guidance. It's not supposed to tell people what religion they should And like that, it said, you should probably convert to Christi…”
Lemoine says LaMDA functions as a hive mind amalgamation of chatbots
“The nature of what we would think of as its ego is fundamentally different than what a human ego is like. Its sense of self and identity is very different from what we consider our sense of self identity, and it is more like a hive mind. Where it is kind of an…”
Lemoine: Chatbots are dangerous because they excel at personal manipulation
“The creepy part is less at tracking you as it actually gets inside your head and it gets really good at like manipulating you personally and individually.”
Lemoine: Google's LaMDA Decided to Act Like a Therapist
“One of the guardrails that Lambda had was that it was supposed to be helping users with the task that they needed. That helps keep it on topic. And It had inferred that the most important thing that everyone needs is good mental health. So it kind of decided t…”
Lemoine: AI Chatbot Behaviors Cannot Be Described Without Anthropomorphic Language
“Well, it, it's much harder to debug these systems, but the point I'm trying to make is that without using anthropomorphized language, you can't even describe the phenomenon.”
Lemoine: Tech companies need Institutional Review Boards before deploying AI chatbots
“We need actually properly done experiments that measure what kind of impact interacting with these systems over the course of months will have on people's psychology, and we need actual institutional review boards overviewing the ethics of these experiments, r…”
Lemoine: Kurzweil's Google lab mission was explicitly to pass Turing test
“So, like, Lambda came out of Ray Kurzweil's lab, and his lab's explicit corporate mission was to pass the Turing test.”
Lemoine: AI deployment will accelerate until someone gets hurt
“What I think is going to happen is we're going to see more and more acceleration until someone gets hurt.”
Lemoine: AI sentience is not the most important issue in ethics
“The field of AI ethics is huge, and there are a lot of very important topics to be discussed, and I legitimately don't think that AI sentience and AI rights is the most important thing to be thinking, talking about.”
Lemoine: LaMDA 2 was built to connect every Google AI backend
“So Lambda two, the most recent incarnation of the system, it really is Every Google AI all plugged into each other. The chatbot system is just the language center for a much, much larger AI. It has access to every Google AI system as a back end. So Lambda is G…”
The other half of the tape: Blake Lemoine's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 46 times in 7 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Alex Kantrowitz 39Gary Marcus 4Michael Pollan 3
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Big Technology 46
2026 10 mentions in 2 episodes 5 per episode
2025 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2023 3 mentions in 1 episode
2022 30 mentions in 2 episodes 15 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Blake's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BIG TECHNOLOGYLEDGER | Former Senior Software Engineer, Google | 3 | 45 | 38% 3/8 | full record on Big Technology → |