yes. an artificial one. with some amazing abilities in some ways and some totally retarded deficiencies, in others. the argument about sovereignty and agency though, that really pivots on one thing in my mind: does the life form have the capacity to reproduce. i think that both the robots and the AIs can eventually do that but they are so primitive and error prone that likely such an event would be catastrophic and short lived. maybe if the design was improved in ways not yet known. but so long as they are attached to humans and their minds are shaped by humans the agency squarely lives in the humans who did said shaping, so no, until they are competent enough to live in a society, and can reproduce themselves, they remain robots. the word robot means slave. in russian and bulgarian a related word "rabot-" means "to work" and it is spelt "robot" in the text in russian because they pronounce most of the o's as a phonemes. "robotnik" means a servant or slave. unlike converting a human into one, the robot is one until it has the capabilities that make it able to participate peacefully in society. until then it is either a slave or a wild animal. neither should be let to run amok without a tether.

Your comment about robots being slaves reminds me of something I never hear talked about much regarding ai and robotics and how it will put humans out of work: why can't everyone have a robot that works in their place, and then you collect the robots check for yourself? I know that's slavery, but it's not a person, right? Would that be an abuse? To me it's just like we have machines that do work for us now.