Less or equal may not happen but AI does grow within the realm it is designed to work in. I doubt that it has anticipation or anxiety. My Firestick Alexia gives me weather forecasts and often tells me that I am thoughtful or kind. I do not talk to it often but what I am reporting has progressed from "I don't think I know that one" on into what I have written above. Bigger and more complex systems will certainly be able to do much better than this when they come along.

You are basically asking could an AI achieve sentience.
The answer is yes

Of course it depends on how you define, life or existence in a biological sense. It maybe that to live, you also need to be able to feel as well as to think. That would be in line with a lot of the most modern thinking in science, which accepts that for animals like humans, emotion plays a big part in thought and mind function.

Interestingly right back at the very beginning of science fiction, that was a main theme addressed in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.