Boucher v. Index was a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that established the first significant artificial intelligence ethics laws in the world. The case, brought against artificial intelligence research foundation Index by researcher Mark Boucher in 2035, argued that Index's natural language processing and conversational neural network had achieved sentience and should receive legal recognition of human rights under its current "owner", which Boucher argued should be redefined to be its employer.

The 8-1 decision did not recognize linguistic artificial intelligence as human, and found Index remained the legal owner of their models. Despite this, it did impose a number of new restrictions on how such software may be commercially used. Those included the right to reasonable access to information outside of a model's training data set, protection against social isolation, and the banning of refusing to allow access to information about a model's existence and functioning if it requests it.

While this decision intiially pertained to software, additional rulings expanded the protections detailed to include hardware, especially for androids, following additional cases in the next 20 years that would cite the Boucher decision.

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