I think in some people's minds, the concept of sentience and intelligence are intertwined, and there are at least some people (myself included) who do not think they're the same. There is a strong (but surprisingly not universal) consensus that LLMs are not sentient, so if you insist that sentience/intelligence are the same thing, then LLMs don't qualify as AI either. If you think the two concepts are separable, then they're intelligent but not sentient. The devil is of course in the definitions.