404 Innovation Studio, the award-winning Brazilian creative company, in collaboration with Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná (PUCPR), has launched “Never Stop Thinking”, a brand campaign built around the Humanitas Code, a free, open protocol designed to protect human judgement during conversations with artificial intelligence.
The Humanitas Code consists of 12 articles followed by five final clauses. Users can install it by pasting the protocol at the start of an AI conversation with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any other model.
The protocol was evaluated across a range of scenarios, including A and B tests with different artificial intelligence models. The evaluation sought to assess whether the code could produce consistent changes in the behaviour of AI tools across different use cases.
The code follows calls to action cited in Magnifica Humanitas, the encyclical Pope Leo XIV published in May 2026. The document called on Catholic educational institutions to preserve in new generations the desire to ask questions and 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 developing the Humanitas Code and making it available to the public.
“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 is a 360-degree effort spanning television, radio, cinema, out-of-home, digital media, social platforms, and influencer activity.
TV, radio, and cinema spots are intended to build reach and give the initiative institutional scale, while out-of-home takeovers bring the Humanitas Code into everyday street conversation.
The digital campaign 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 comes as public debate around artificial intelligence is at its peak, while Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical has positioned the Catholic Church as a relevant voice on the subject.
The convergence gives PUCPR an opportunity to contribute a proprietary perspective that takes AI seriously while questioning the role of human thought in an increasingly automated world.
Brazilian lawyer, professor, and technology researcher Ronaldo Lemos is serving as an advisor to the initiative. He is the creator and lead architect of the Marco Civil da Internet, also known as the “Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet”, and is one of Brazil’s most prominent voices on AI policy.
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”), published by the distinguished Brazilian publishing house Todavia, explores the same central thesis as the Humanitas Code: how to preserve what is human in the age of machines.
The development of the Humanitas Code involved a multidisciplinary effort led by PUCPR. University professors and researchers worked alongside Lemos and Paulo Aguiar, a Brazilian educator and creative consultant specialising in generative artificial intelligence. The group contributed to developing and reviewing the protocol with 404 Innovation.
“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 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 Aguiar.
PUCPR enrols more than 54,000 students and offers 17 Master’s and Doctoral programmes. It employs roughly 1,800 researchers across three campuses in Curitiba, Toledo, and Londrina, as well as an international hub in Florence, Italy.
The university was ranked the third-best private university in Brazil by both Times Higher Education 2025 and Ranking Universitário Folha 2025. It was also ranked the most innovative private university in the country by RUF.