I don't believe he claims to, no.

He coined the term “object,” but what he meant by a computational object was different than what it came to mean: a data structure with associated operations upon it. Kay meant a parallel thread of execution which was generally sitting in a waiting state—one could make a very strong analogy between Smalltalk's vision of “objects” and what we call today “microservices,” albeit all living within the same programming language as an ecosystem rather than all being independent languages implementing some API.

But whether this is an “object-oriented” vision depends on whether you think that an object is intrinsically a data structure or an independent computer with its own memory speaking a common API. The most visible difference is that in the latter case one object mutating any other object's properties is evil—it is one computer secretly modifying another’s memory—whereas in the other case it is shrug-worthy. But arguably the bigger issue is philosophical.

That is hard to explain and so it might be best to have a specific example. So Smalltalk invents MVC and then you see endless reinventions that call themselves MVC in other languages. But most of these other adaptations of MVC have very object-oriented models: they describe some sort of data structure in some sort of data modeling language. But that is not the “object” understanding of a model in Smalltalk. When Smalltalk says “model” it means a computer which is maintaining two things: a current value of some data, and a list of subscribers to that value. Its API accepts requests to create/remove subscriptions, to modify the value, and to read the value. The modifications all send notifications to anyone who is subscribed to the value. There is not necessarily anything wrong with data-modeling the data, but it is not the central point of the model, which is the list of subscribers.

A more extreme example: no OOP system that I know of would do something as barbarous as to implement a function which would do the following:

> Search through memory for EVERY reference to that object, and replace it with a reference to this object.

That just sounds like the worst idea ever in OOP-land; my understanding of objects is as data structures which are probably holding some sort of meaningful data; how dare you steal my data structure and replace it with another. But Smalltalk has this; it is called Object.become. If you are thinking of objects as these microservicey things then yeah, of course I want to find out how some microservice is misbehaving and then build a microservice that doesn't misbehave that way and then eventually swap my new microservice in for the running one. (That also hints at the necessary architecture to do this without literally scanning memory: like a DNS lookup giving you the actual address, every reference to an object must be a double-star pointer under the hood.) And as a direct consequence, when you are running Smalltalk you can modify almost every single bit of functionality in any of the standard libraries to be whatever you need it to be, live, while the program is running. Indeed the attitude in Smalltalk is that you will not write it in some text editor, but in the living program itself: the program you are designing is running as you are writing it and you use this ability to swap out components to massage it into the program that you need it to become.