Well the article says its not even self replicating. It requires humans to do much of the work of providing specific machinery and materials that it needs to make copies of itself.

But it also doesn't do much. That's a nebulous, hard to pin down statement. But I mean it doesn't have all the complex machinery and behaviors of living cells. It's static and kind of just floats around. Until things happen to bump into it and stick.

It's not fundamentally different than a virus. Which are also self replicating, but I don't think they are considered "living".