You can't make that claim without being able to precisely explain how sentience works
Discussion
No, it's enough for me to explain how it does not work.
Machine learning algorithms are just math. We train these models by feeding the algorithms a shit ton of example data and then backpropagate and whatever. The result is a bunch of weights, or numbers. So for someone to argue that LLMs are sentient is essentially the same as arguing that solving for x creates sentience.