Brazilian creative company, 404 Innovation Studio, and private non-profit university, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná (PUCPR), have launched The Humanitas Code – a free, open protocol designed to protect human judgement inside conversations with artificial intelligence – with the campaign, Never Stop Thinking.

The Humanitas Code is a 12-article protocol, followed by five final clauses, that users install by pasting it at the start of any AI conversation – ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any other model. The protocol was subjected to a range of evaluation scenarios, including A/B tests conducted with different artificial intelligence models, to assess the code’s ability to produce consistent changes in the behaviour of the tools across different use cases.

The code follows calls to action cited in Magnifica Humanitas, the encyclical Pope Leo XIV published in May 2026, which called on Catholic educational institutions to preserve in new generations the desire to ask questions and to protect human thought from being replaced by increasingly efficient machines. PUCPR, a Catholic research university with a nearly 70-year tradition of combining scientific research with humanistic education, responded by building the Humanitas Code and putting it into public hands.

“The question we kept coming back to wasn’t what AI will do to work; it was what is AI doing to thinking,” stated Cristina Pastore, director of brand and future at PUCPR and the executive who conceived and continues to lead the project. “For a university whose mission for nearly 70 years has been to shape people who think, that question isn’t academic. The Humanitas Code is our answer. 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, added, “The use of AI is going to change our lives, and we need to give people tools that help them build a better relationship with these technologies. The Humanitas Code is a piece of code, from a university, given away to the public, that changes the behaviour of the AI in front of you. To our knowledge, it’s among the first examples of a brand building cognitive protection directly into an AI tool for the person using it.”

The full campaign covers TV, radio, and cinema spots. Out-of-home takeovers push the Humanitas Code into everyday street conversation. Digital includes display placements across high-traffic portals, native content on major social platforms, influencer activations, and a dedicated landing page where visitors can copy, install, and share the code themselves.

The initiative arrives at a moment when the public debate around Artificial Intelligence is at its peak and when Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical has repositioned the Catholic Church as a relevant voice on the subject.

The development of the Humanitas Code was a multidisciplinary effort led by PUCPR, bringing together university professors and researchers. Brazilian lawyer, professor, and technology researcher, Ronaldo Lemos, the creator and lead architect of the Marco Civil da Internet (aka Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet) and one of Brazil’s most prominent voices on AI policy, served as advisors, contributing to the development and review of the protocol with Paulo Aguiar, a Brazilian educator and creative consultant specialising in generative artificial intelligence, alongside 404 Innovation Studio.

“What makes the Humanitas Code particularly interesting, beyond the fact that there are no similar precedents in the world, is that it transforms the responsible use of artificial intelligence into a tool embedded in our everyday interaction with technology. Rather than simply discussing the future of AI, we have created mechanisms to influence this relationship in the present,” stated Ronaldo Lemos. “And it is precisely this practical application that makes the Code relevant: transforming principles of responsibility and ethics into guidelines for the choices and interactions we make with AI every day.”

The Humanitas Code is available now at http://nuncaparedepensar.com.br and is free for anyone to install and share.