This place is pretty contradictory.
For one, it looks like people are saying that having chakra=being alive. That should mean that once something is out of chakra, it is no longer alive. But, several members came to the conclusion that chakra doesn't really matter in the first place. Meaning that everyone has infinite chakra unless the plot determines that you don't, so there's shouldn't be a case where something runs out of chakra. By that logic, the Gedo Mazo could be powered by a single squirrel or generic farmer.
http://forum.shinobilegends.com/index.php/topic,8891.0.htmlOn the other hand, the wiki states the following.
Madara believed that the Demonic Statue and Hashirama's DNA produced artificial humans, when in actuality Black Zetsu was removing them from within the Demonic Statue, where they had been stored for centuries.
So technically, even when Madara was using it as life support, he was still using the contents of the statue. (think of the Gedo as a vase and the zetsus as the water/plants that fill it).
But then there's this quote,
The Demonic Statue emanates a tremendous life force, enabling a jinchūriki of the Ten-Tails to survive the extraction of all nine tailed beasts as long as the statue remains inside them, though they will still be greatly weakened and rendered paralysed for several months.
that basically states the thing is living. But, at that point, it already had the power of several tailed beasts inside of it that could have been keeping it alive.
Personally, I think it should be an item because unless you have some kind of battery for it, it's just a fancy item. If you want to give it the same rules as a beast just because it has chakra, you'd have to do the same for countless items on the wiki because there are several sentient weapons/items that have their own chakra. And for anything that can absorb chakra, as soon as it has some chakra inside of it then it would also fall under that classification.
It's all just tricky business and word manipulation, like we're lawyers trying to win a case by finding every single loophole that might have appeared thanks to a missing word or letter.