Purely sentients being couldn't be considered alive unless they find a way to connect with the physical world and with the same intricacies. But for a robot capable of awareness and interacting with people, wouldn't it check both fundamentals to be alive ? Having a functional corpse, having a functional mind.

To me a program becomes sentient the moment it starts being truly aware of its surrounding (and not because you told him what to be aware of), so far, I think the best we do is deep learning, and this is still far from being adequate to be called alive, we're still just scratchings the learning processes.

Shortly: an A.I could be alive if it checks all the prerequisites, and would be alive for sure if it checks all the possible criteria within a classification (not sure if there's one for life, but I was thinking of language with the classification of Hockett as an example.)