Luxembourg Declaration on artificial intelligence and human values

Adopted by the Humanists International General Assembly, Luxembourg, 2025.

In the face of artificial intelligence’s rapid advancement, we stand at a unique moment in human history. New technologies offer unprecedented potential to enhance human flourishing but handled carelessly they also pose profound risks to human freedoms, human security, and our collective future.

AI systems already pervade innumerable aspects of human life and are developing far more rapidly than current ethical frameworks and governance structures can adapt. At the same time, the rapid concentration of these powerful capabilities within a small number of hands threatens to issue new challenges to civil liberties, democracies, and our vision of a more just and equal world.

In response to these historic challenges, the global humanist community affirms the following principles on the need to align artificial intelligence with human values rooted in reason, evidence, and our shared humanity:

1. Human judgment: AI systems have the potential to empower and assist individuals and societies to achieve more in all aspects of human life. But they must never displace human judgment, human reason, human ethics, or human responsibility for our actions. Decisions that deeply affect people’s lives must always remain in human hands.
2. Common good: Fundamentally, states must recognise that AI should be a tool to serve humanity rather than enrich a privileged few. The benefits of technological advancement should flow widely throughout society rather than concentrate power and wealth in ever-fewer hands. 
3. Democratic governance: New technologies must be democratically accountable at all levels – from local communities and small private enterprises through to large multinationals and countries. No corporation, nation, or special interest should wield unaccountable power through technologies with potential to affect every sphere of human activity. Lawmakers, regulators, and public bodies must develop and sustain the expertise to keep pace with AI’s evolution and respond to emerging challenges.
4. Transparency and autonomy: Citizens cannot meaningfully participate in democracies if the decisions affecting their lives are opaque. Transparency must be embedded not only in laws and regulations, but in the design of AI systems themselves — designed responsibly, with clear intent and purpose, and full human accountability. Laws should guarantee that every individual can freely decide how their personal data is used, and grant all citizens the means to query, contest, and shape how technologies are deployed.
5. Protection from harm: Protecting people from harm must be a foundational principle of all AI systems, not an afterthought. As AI risks amplifying existing injustices in society – including racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism – states and developers must act to prevent its use in discrimination, manipulation, unjust surveillance, targeted violence or the suppression of lawful speech. Governments and business leaders must commit to long-term AI safety research and monitoring, aligning future AI systems with human goals, desires, and needs. 
6. Shared prosperity: Previous industrial revolutions pursued progress without sufficient regard for human suffering. Today we must not. Technological advancement cannot be allowed to erode human dignity or entrench social divides. A truly human-centric approach demands bold investment in training, education, and social protections to enhance jobs, protect human dignity, and support those workers and communities most affected.
7. Creators and artists: Properly harnessed, AI can help more people enjoy the benefits of creativity — expressing themselves, experimenting with new ideas, and collaborating in ways that bring personal meaning and joy. But we must continue to recognise and protect the unique value that human artists bring to creative work. Intellectual property frameworks must guarantee fair compensation, attribution, and protection for human artists and creators.
8. Reason, truth, and integrity: Human freedom and progress depend on our ability to distinguish truth from falsehood and fact from fiction. As AI systems introduce new and far-reaching risks to the integrity of information, legal frameworks must rise to protect free inquiry, freedom of expression, and the health of democracy itself from the growing threat of misinformation, disinformation, and deliberate deception at scale.
9. Future generations: The choices we make about AI today will shape the world for generations to come. Governments, civil society, and technology leaders must remain vigilant and act with foresight – prioritising the mitigation of environmental harms and long-term risks to human survival. These decisions must be guided by our responsibilities not only to one another, but to future human generations, other animals, and the wider ecosystem we rely on.
10. Human freedom, human flourishing: The ultimate value of AI will lie in its contribution to human happiness. To that end, we should embed shared values that promote human flourishing into AI systems — and be ambitious in using AI to maximise human freedom. For individuals, this could mean more time at leisure, in fulfilling pursuits, learning, reflecting, and making richer connections with other human beings. Collectively, we should realise these benefits by making advances in science and medicine, resolving pressing global challenges, and addressing inequalities within our societies. 

We commit ourselves as humanist organisations and as individuals to advocating these same principles in the governance, ethics, and deployment of AI worldwide.

We affirm the importance of humanist values to navigating these new frontiers – only by prioritising reason, compassion, dignity, freedom, and our shared humanity can human societies adequately navigate these challenging new frontiers. 

We call upon governments, corporations, civil society, and individuals to adopt these same principles through concrete policies, practices, and international agreements, taking this opportunity to renew our commitments to human rights, human dignity, and human flourishing now and always.

Suggested academic reference

'Luxembourg Declaration on artificial intelligence and human values', Humanists International, General Assembly, 2025