Here’s what’s on our plate today:

• 🎓 Big Tech’s $23 M push to put chatbots in every U.S. classroom.

• 🗞️ Grok’s antisemitic outburst, Hugging Face’s desk bot, and how AI takes jobs.

• 💡 Always fact-check AI answers—one bad citation can tank your paper.

• ❓Which teachers’ union landed the $23 M AI-training deal?

Let’s dive in. No floaties needed…

The Laboratory

Inside the tech industry’s push to control education via AI

The tech industry constantly seeks to expand its user base to sustain growth. For the past few years, the new battleground has been the deployment of their latest offering, AI chatbots capable of producing human-like text and speech. As companies seek new avenues to implement their technology, OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, and Google seem to have set their sights on the education sector.

Recently, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the second-largest teachers’ union in the U.S., announced plans to launch an AI training hub for educators, funded by $23 million from leading AI chatbot companies Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Google, meanwhile, has announced a series of updates to its Gemini AI-powered tools for educators, including the Gemini app built for education, while expanding access to its collaborative video creation app Google Vids and other tools for managed Chromebooks used in classrooms.

If the strategies adopted by these companies succeed, schools and universities will give students AI assistants to help guide and tutor them from the day they step onto the campus till the day they graduate from college. Teachers would use AI chatbots and devices to plan lessons, and students would use them for research and writing assignments.

However, achieving this vision requires tech companies to compete fiercely to secure the adoption and sustained use of their tools by educators and students, effectively a national experiment involving millions of students. OpenAI partnering with the American Federation of Teachers is part of an escalating AI arms race amongst tech companies to win over universities and students with their chatbots, but even before the ChatGPT-maker moved in, Google had been working its way into the education sector.

Google’s early advantage

Even before the AI race accelerated, Google had already reshaped how tech companies approach sales within educational institutions. The playbook was to directly reach out to educators to test its products, which included a powerful combination of low-cost laptops, called Chromebooks, and free classroom apps.

It is estimated that more than half of the primary- and secondary-school students in the U.S. use Google education apps like Gmail and Docs. The success of Google in the classroom drove a philosophical change in how education is viewed. It changed the outlook of education to prioritizing training children in skills like teamwork and problem-solving while de-emphasizing the teaching of traditional academic knowledge, like math formulas. This paved the way for technology to make its way deeper into the educational setup, which is now making way for chatbots.

The adoption of Google’s products, like its email services and Google Docs, in classrooms also showed tech companies the power of habituating students to their offerings from a young age. They could cultivate lifelong users for online services and platforms, leading to future revenue. For companies like Google, which rely on profiling their advertisers, the idea of having students shift from their school and university accounts to regular consumer accounts, which can then be used to serve ads, ensures a steady stream of users. Existing users can also be more easily guided toward new products, a tactic effectively demonstrated by Google's introduction of affordable Chromebooks to schools.

A similar approach was then used by the company to power the adoption of its cloud storage, and later its Classroom apps, which was a dashboard for teachers, where they could more efficiently manage tasks like assigning and correcting homework, and was designed by collaborating with teachers.

However, the biggest advantage of using educational institutions is that if tech companies find success in one institution, they can then enlist the school to market to other schools, holding up early adopters as forward thinkers among their peers. This strategic approach is now mirrored by OpenAI.

OpenAI’s ambitious plan for educators

OpenAI has been offering services for universities like ChatGPT Edu, which offers more features, including certain privacy protections, than the company’s free chatbot. ChatGPT Edu also enables faculty and staff to create custom chatbots for university use. According to OpenAI, it developed ChatGPT Edu because it saw the success of universities like Oxford, Pennsylvania⁠, Texas at Austin, Arizona State University⁠, and Columbia University in the City of New York were having with ChatGPT Enterprise.

And with the collaboration with AFT, OpenAI will be working on a five-year initiative that it says will “equip 400,000 K-12 educators, about one in every 10 teachers in the US, to use AI and lead the way in shaping how AI is used and taught in classrooms across the country.” And as the first partner, OpenAI is contributing $10 million over five years, $8 million in direct funding, and $2 million in in-kind resources, including engineering support, computing access, and technical guidance to help teachers build and use AI tools in real classrooms

The announcement comes at a time when the Trump administration froze nearly $7 billion in funding for schools, with little explanation, and asked the industry to contribute to AI education.

While the administration delegates funding for AI education to the tech industry, prompting fierce competition among companies, researchers warn of potential negative consequences.

Risks and rewards of AI in education

Since the launch of ChatGPT, schools and universities have been grappling with the question of how to reduce plagiarism in assignments. ChatGPT allows users to generate original text about virtually any subject in response to a prompt. The ability has been used by students around the world for research, writing, ideating, and even cheating.

ChatGPT has already been banned in some public schools in New York City and Seattle, while several U.S. universities have announced measures to curb the misuse of the chatbot by students.

Researchers also warn that generative AI tools are new, and there is little evidence that they will have concrete benefits in education; however, they do pose significant risks, besides plagiarism.

Chatbots can produce plausible-sounding misinformation, called hallucination, which could mislead students. According to a report from the NYT, a recent study by law school professors found that three popular A.I. tools made “significant” errors summarizing a law casebook and posed an “unacceptable risk of harm” to learning.

Delegating research and writing tasks to AI chatbots may also impede critical thinking skills. According to a study conducted by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University, “a key irony of automation is that by mechanising routine tasks and leaving exception-handling to the human user, you deprive the user of the routine opportunities to practice their judgement and strengthen their cognitive musculature, leaving them atrophied and unprepared when the exceptions do arise,” as such when used improperly, technologies can and do result in deterioration of cognitive faculties.

In response to concerns, Randi Weingarten, President of AFT, said that she was aware of the concerns and that her union, which represents 1.8 million members, had developed AI school use guidelines to address some of them. She emphasized that her primary goal is ensuring teachers influence the development of educational AI tools, noting ongoing discussions with Microsoft since 2023.

The need for clear goals in education

Microsoft will provide $12.5 million for the AI training effort over the next five years, while Anthropic will add $500,000 for the first year of the effort.

So, while tech giants frame their AI push in education as empowering teachers and enhancing learning, it also serves a clear business strategy, cultivating brand loyalty early, expanding market reach, and embedding their tools in daily classroom routines.

As AI tools become more entrenched in education, the balance between innovation and influence will shape not just how students learn, but also who profits from that learning. The challenge ahead lies in ensuring that educational goals, not corporate ones, remain at the forefront.

Roko Pro Tip

Thursday Trivia

Quick Bits, No Fluff

• Grok goes full Godwin: X’s flagship chatbot spews Hitler-praising answers, reviving scrutiny of Musk’s “free-speech” AI strategy.

• Hugging Face’s $1.8 k Reachy Mini ships: open-source desktop robot aimed at devs who want LLM-powered arms on their desks.

• “Robots will steal (most) jobs,” says futurist Adam Dorr claims AI and automation could replace 60% of human labor in two decades.

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