"it's just a simulation" is not the shield you think it is. not when models interact with the real world.
Everyone I've talked to about LLMs outside of this forum sees them as an amusing entertainment, and possibly occasionally useful for a few suggestions. Not something that's going to change their world any time soon, and certainly not anything that we should be trusting with anything sensitive in any way. Literally everyone.
In any case, I think you're really missing what the actual question was that I was responding to: Would conferring legal personhood change my mind about actual personhood.
The ability to do harm is not, in my mind, particularly relevant to questions of personhood. In fact, I would think that a much better indicator thereof would be the ability to choose not to do harm, given the capability, and someone trying to make you do so.
Well, "conferring legal personhood" would mandatorily (by law) fix your behavior and professional conduct against one.
And it will also change education etc - you will be taught in official textbooks that it's a person and you should consider it as such.
This might not change your mind, but will change the minds of most kids being taught that.
Note that I'm not saying it's impossible that some military might choose to do so: I'm saying that the choice itself is hopelessly negligent and guaranteed to result in the pointless death of innocents.
Furthermore, I don't think even a military that's that stupid and uncaring about human life would consider for a second opening up an LLM like that to inputs from arbitrary people on the Internet.
If you can come up with a fantasy scenario that has some vague sense of plausibility, I might be willing to entertain it; whatever this is is just not even worth dignifying with that level of response.