Commentary

Brazilian University and Ad Studio Launch Free AI Protocol Citing Pope Leo XIV Encyclical

Published on September 1, 2026

Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná (PUCPR) and Brazilian creative company 404 Innovation Studio launched a campaign called “Never Stop Thinking” to promote the Humanitas Code, a free 12-article protocol that users paste into the start of a conversation with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any other AI model. The code is designed to prompt the tool to cite sources, present alternative perspectives, and keep final decisions with the user.

PUCPR built the protocol in response to Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas,” published in May 2026, which called on Catholic educational institutions to protect human thought and the impulse to ask questions from being displaced by increasingly capable machines. The university tested the code across a range of scenarios, including A/B tests run on different AI models, to evaluate whether it produced consistent behavioral changes across use cases.

“The question we kept coming back to wasn’t what AI will do to work; it was what is AI doing to thinking,” said Cristina Pastore, PUCPR’s Director of Brand and Future, who conceived and leads the project. “We believe in AI, and we also believe the final decision has always belonged to the human. We want to keep it that way.”

Rafael Caldeira, co-founder of 404 Innovation Studio, said the code is “among the first examples of a brand building cognitive protection directly into an AI tool for the person using it.”

The campaign spans TV, radio, cinema and out-of-home placements alongside a digital layer that includes display ads, native social content and influencer activations, directing audiences to a landing page where the code can be copied, installed and shared. Brazilian technology lawyer Ronaldo Lemos, the lead architect of Brazil’s Marco Civil da Internet, is serving as an advisor.

PUCPR enrolls more than 54,000 students and employs roughly 1,800 researchers across three campuses in Paraná and an international hub in Florence, Italy. It was named the third-best private university in Brazil by Times Higher Education and Ranking Universitário Folha in 2025.