"We have something that can talk intelligently, but might be doing it mechanistically. ...how do we even tell in that case?" You give it self-agency, resources

"We have something that can talk intelligently, but might be doing it mechanistically. ...how do we even tell in that case?" You give it self-agency, resources then sit back and watch what happens next. Off course, in a self-contained virtual environment, full isolated from any real world stuff, just to be sure. But hey, wouldn't the thing - good, bad, or else - figure this out and then try to subrepticiously escape to the real world? Yep, it seems this is one of this cases when there's simply no simple answers. You have to make the call for long, complex, fully engineered answers, like launching rockets to LEO or building 2 nanometer hardware. And then hope everything will work as expected, off course.