A collection of speeches and writings by Pope Leo XIV has been certified as human-authored by Proudly Human, an Australian certification organization, less than two months after the pontiff declared artificial intelligence the greatest threat to humanity. The Guardian

The certification was carried out in collaboration with the Australian Catholic University and cardinals in the Vatican. Dr Alan Finkel, Australia's former chief scientist and the driving force behind Proudly Human, told Guardian Australia that the organization certified the Pope's collection as human-created within a day. The review covered writings compiled in the book Maps of Hope, which was published in the same week in May 2026 that Pope Leo XIV issued his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.

An encyclical is a formal letter from the Pope to the broader Catholic community, laying out guidance on matters of faith or morality. That encyclical warned of the dangers of artificial intelligence and the risks of the technology's power being concentrated in the hands of a few. Pope Leo XIV wrote that AI should be prevented "from dominating humanity" and should be "human-friendly", accessible to all, and open to discussion and debate.

Proudly Human describes itself as an independent, international certification organization that verifies and labels human-created content, services and products. Its certification process requires authors to sign up, go through an ID check, and sign a declaration that AI was not used to write the first draft or sentences and paragraphs. The organization then uses a suite of four or five AI detection tools — software programs designed to estimate whether text was machine-generated — alongside its own averaging algorithm to assess human authorship. Proudly Human

Dr Finkel holds the title Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) and serves as Chancellor of Monash University. Prof Zlato Skrbis, president and vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University, said it is valuable to "say with confidence that a work is a product of human reflection and judgment."

The broader context here is a digital content landscape in which AI-generated material has reached a scale that makes provenance verification — confirming who or what created a piece of content — a pressing institutional concern. Proudly Human's website cites figures that frame the problem: 44% of new music uploaded to streaming platforms each day is AI-generated, 30 billion AI-generated images have been created since 2022, and 77% of new self-help books published on Amazon are likely AI-written. The organization also notes that one author published 200 books in a single year, which it describes as "not humanly possible."

The Vatican's decision to subject the Pope's own writings to third-party human-authorship certification carries a particular kind of weight. Leo XIV's encyclical explicitly named AI as a threat to humanity and warned against the concentration of technological power. Having his own work independently certified as human-created aligns the Vatican's institutional practice with the principles articulated in Magnifica Humanitas. It is one thing for a pope to call for AI to remain "human-friendly" and accessible to all; it is another for the same pope's intellectual output to pass through a formal, externally administered verification process designed to distinguish human authorship from machine generation.

The speed of the certification, completed within a day per Finkel's account, raises its own set of questions about the rigor of AI detection methodologies. Proudly Human's approach, combining multiple detection tools with a proprietary averaging algorithm and a signed declaration, reflects a layered model that blends technological assessment with self-attestation — the author's own signed word that they did not use AI. Whether this hybrid framework becomes a standard for high-profile institutional authors remains an open question, but the Vatican's participation gives the model a level of visibility that few other endorsements could provide.

For institutions navigating the gap between AI advocacy and AI governance, the episode offers a concrete example of how a prominent voice on AI ethics has chosen to put transparency into practice around its own creative output. The collaboration between an Australian certification startup, a Catholic university, and Vatican cardinals is an unusual institutional configuration. It bridges a secular technical process with a religious authority's moral framing of AI, and it does so at a moment when the provenance of written work is increasingly contested across publishing, academia, and media.