LLMs are made to mimic how we speak, and some can even pass the Turing test, so I'm not surprised that people who don't know better think of these LLMs as conscious in some way or another.
It's not a necessarily a fault on those people, it's a fault on how LLMs are purposefully misadvertised to the masses
An agreement with Russia isn't worth the paper its written in. The Kremlin lies as easily as it breathes.