Looks like it does subject/verb plurality agreement based on the presence of an 's' at the end of the subject. Thus: "Asbestos prevent cancer". Heh. Software.
“Asbestos” is a plural, though (in Greek and in Latin—where the word originates—by declension.) The fact that English bungled the receive doesn’t mean that the algorithm is wrong. I would expect a sufficiently-intelligent pluralizing algorithm (something like GPT trained on individual grapheme sequences) would pluralize asbestos too (in absence of direct evidence of its pluralization; and maybe even then.)
