This is a call to start-ups and industry working in communities to bring the mythologies, cosmologies, and living traditions of their own cultures forward as guides of the machines — and to show, in art that crosses every border, what responsible AI can look like.
Over the year since the AI Hub for Sustainable Development launched, we have watched — and taken part in — the decisions AI start-up founders and industries are making, from agriculture to education, from language and voice technology to data centers. Often these start-ups and private-sector actors are guided by something deeper than a business case: a humanity that draws on their own culture and refines the discipline of questioning.
This initiative is our attempt to widen the space for that dialogue — between communities and the machines being built — so it can come fully alive, as a way to disarm AI and guide its governance.
Inspired by Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas
In May 2026, the encyclical named the central moral question of the AI era through two biblical images:
The Tower of Babel — technology built on pride, efficiency, and the erasure of difference. A project without God, which ended in dispersion, confusion, and loss of common language. And the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah — shared reconstruction, community-led, each family assigned their section of the wall, no one left behind. Diversity transformed into a resource.
And every culture on earth has its own stories about power and care, domination and dignity, the hunger that destroys and the hands that heal. This call asks AI start-ups and builders of human interest AI interacting with frontier AI Labs from each of the 25 countries in the G7 and 18 Africa-Italy Mattei Plan countries to find those stories — and use them to illuminate the AI decisions being made right now, in hospitals and fields, in data centers and parliaments, in voice agents advising farmers and algorithms deciding who gets credit.
All other countries are also welcome to participate in creating a global key of wisdom where consequential AI decisions are being made, to help all of us steer the relationship of humanity with AI.
