Pope Leo XIV's speeches pass AI detection test, weeks after he called AI humanity's biggest threat
An Australian company has officially certified a collection of the Pope's writings as genuinely human-authored. The timing is hard to miss.
Key points
- Proudly Human, an Australian AI-detection company, certified Pope Leo XIV's collected speeches and writings as human-authored in 2025.
- The certification came less than two months after Pope Leo XIV publicly called artificial intelligence the greatest threat to humanity.
- Proudly Human was founded by Dr Alan Finkel, Australia's former chief scientist.
- The review was carried out with Australian Catholic University, the book's publisher, and cardinals inside the Vatican.
Pope Leo XIV made headlines earlier this year when he stood before the world and named artificial intelligence the single greatest threat to humanity. Now, an AI-detection firm has confirmed that his own words are exactly what they appear to be: written by a human.
Proudly Human, an Australian company founded by Dr Alan Finkel, who served as Australia's chief scientist from 2016 to 2020, has certified a collection of the Pope's speeches and writings under its "Proudly Human" mark. Think of that mark like a quality stamp on a food label, except instead of confirming what's in the tin, it confirms who did the writing.
The review was a collaboration. Proudly Human worked alongside Australian Catholic University, which published the collection, and cardinals inside the Vatican. That last detail matters: the Holy See opened its own archives to help verify the authenticity of the texts.
The Guardian AI first reported the certification.
The timing gives the story its edge. A religious leader calls AI an existential danger, then needs a technology company to prove his words weren't written by the very thing he fears. There is something almost poetic about it.
Why does this certification actually matter?
It matters because the question is no longer hypothetical. AI writing tools, the software that can generate essays, letters and speeches in seconds, are now good enough that readers, editors and institutions genuinely cannot tell the difference with the naked eye. Certification services like Proudly Human exist precisely because that gap has closed.
For ordinary readers, the wider lesson is practical. Documents that carry real authority, legal contracts, medical advice, public statements, journalism, can now be faked convincingly enough to fool most people most of the time. Knowing who actually wrote something is becoming a meaningful credential, not just a curiosity.
For the Vatican, the certification is a statement of principle. If the Pope is asking the world to think carefully about AI's role in human life, having his own writing independently verified is putting skin in the game.
Dr Finkel has argued publicly that the ability to prove human authorship will become one of the defining trust questions of this decade. This certification, modest in scope, is a small but concrete example of what that argument looks like in practice.
