São Paulo and Curitiba, Brazil (August 31, 2026) — 404 Innovation Studio, the award-winning Brazilian creative company, in collaboration with Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná (PUCPR) today launched “Never Stop Thinking,” a brand campaign built around the release of the Humanitas Code — a free, open protocol designed to protect human judgment inside conversations with artificial intelligence.
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. The evaluation phase sought to assess the code’s ability to produce consistent changes in the behavior 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,” said 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, said the studio’s starting point was the sheer volume of AI commentary already in circulation. “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,” Caldeira said. “The Humanitas Code is a piece of code, from a university, given away to the public, that changes the behavior 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 campaign rolls out as a 360-degree effort. TV, radio, and cinema spots build reach and lend the initiative institutional scale. Out-of-home takeovers push the Humanitas Code into everyday street conversation. The digital layer carries the deepest engagement, with 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. That convergence opens a rare editorial window for a Catholic university to contribute a proprietary point of view — one that takes the technology seriously while pressing the question of what human thought is for.
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, is serving as an advisor to the initiative. His most recent book, “O Monge, o Iogue e o Faquir — Corpo, Coração e Mente no Tempo das Máquinas” (“The Monk, the Yogi, and the Fakir — Body, Heart, and Mind in the Age of Machines”) by distinguished Brazilian publishing house Todavia, takes up the same central thesis as the Humanitas Code; namely, how to preserve what is human in the age of machines.
Building a framework that brings together academia, experts and technology
The development of the Humanitas Code involved a multidisciplinary effort led by PUCPR, bringing together university professors and researchers, as well as the participation of technology lawyer, professor and researcher Ronaldo Lemos, and Paulo Aguiar, a Brazilian educator and creative consultant specializing in generative artificial intelligence. They contributed to the development and review of the protocol, 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,” says 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,” adds Paulo Aguiar.
PUCPR brings substantial institutional weight to the initiative. The university enrolls more than 54,000 students, 17 Master’s and Doctoral programs, and employs roughly 1,800 researchers spread over three campuses — Curitiba, Toledo and Londrina — plus an international hub in Florence, Italy. It was named the 3rd best private university in Brazil by both Times Higher Education 2025 and Ranking Universitário Folha 2025, and the most innovative private university in the country by the RUF.
The Humanitas Code is available now at http://nuncaparedepensar.com.
