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Conscious sentient AI seems to be all but a certainty in our future, whether in fifty years’ time or only five years. When that time comes, we will be faced with entities with the potential to experience more pain and suffering than any other living entity on Earth. In this paper, we look at this potential for suffering and the reasons why we would need to create a framework for protecting artificial entities. We look to current animal welfare laws and regulations to investigate why certain animals are given legal protections, and how this can be applied to AI. We use a meta-theory of consciousness to determine what developments in AI technology are needed to bring AI to the level of animal sentience where legal arguments for their protection can be made. We finally speculate on what a future conscious AI could look like based on current technology.