True that A* would later go on to be used in computer game bots (as LLMs may eventually be) where "an AI" doesn't necessarily correspond to the field of AI, but

True that A* would later go on to be used in computer game bots (as LLMs may eventually be) where "an AI" doesn't necessarily correspond to the field of AI, but A* was still within what was understood to be the field of AI at the time it was published. The meaning shifting over time, and the reason for which it shifts, is the AI effect. Heuristic-guided pathfinding is no longer what's meant by AI, IBM Deep Blue's alpha–beta search is no longer what's meant by AI, and I'd claim it's even shifting away from earlier image classifiers in favor of only generative models like GPT4.