Education’s AI ‘gold rush’ comes with risks for students
Christian Science Monitor · C · trust 49/100
| Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff Seventh graders work in a coding and AI data sciences class at Kulia Academy, a public charter school in Honolulu, Oct. 28, 2025. Loading...
Across the United States, financially strapped school districts are spending increasing amounts of money on artificial intelligence products, despite a growing body of research showing AI can harm children’s ability to think.
Education’s AI sector, virtually nonexistent before ChatGPT’s release in 2022, grew to $730 million in 2026, according to a report prepared for The Monitor by Future Market Insights. The research firm projects the market for AI in K-12 education will grow by 40% annually for the next decade, reaching $18.5 billion in 2036.
The beneficiaries, observers say, are a growing list of companies with names like MagicSchool, SchoolAI, and Buddy. They seek to profit from a quandary increasingly facing educators: Students and teachers are already using AI. But not always in a way that facilitates learning.
As Silicon Valley titans and startups cash in, educators and parents struggle to decide which artificial intelligence tools help – or harm.
“My students can put a homework question into Google and the AI summary will give them the answer,” says Merek Chang, who teaches chemistry and biology at Los Altos High School in the San Gabriel Valley, outside Los Angeles.
The tech companies say their specialized AI products provide the solution. AI can help teachers write lesson plans and grade papers, saving them time, the companies say, while “personalized learning” bots cater to students’ individual needs and produce spectacular academic gains.
But without a significant body of research proving these tools’ efficacy – and some studies showing harm – a growing number of experts are worried that children have become the guinea pigs of the next Big Tech experiment.
“There has been an absolute gold rush,” says Kris Hagel, chief information officer at the Peninsula School District, outside Tacoma, Washington.
Meanwhile, frontier AI firms Anthropic and OpenAI have announced they are offering their Claude and ChatGPT products to educators for free – but only temporarily. Anthropic’s commitment to complimentary service for educators expires June 2027; OpenAI’s expires June 2028.
“They want to capture the market. We’ve seen this many times before,” says Chris Agnew, director of the Generative AI for Education Hub at Stanford University.
Steve Sanchez/Sipa USA/AP Parents and teachers hold a rally calling on New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and School Chancellor Kamar Samuels to have a two-year moratorium on AI in public schools in New York, July 29, 2026. Mr. Samuels has asked principals to pause purchases of AI software. In an interview, OpenAI’s vice president of education, Leah Belsky, declined to speculate on whether ChatGPT would remain free for educators, but she said helping teachers is part of the company’s mission. Anthropic did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
According to the Center for Democracy and Technology, an estimated 85% of teachers and 86% of students already utilize generative AI in their schoolwork.
The Trump administration has pushed school districts to incorporate AI. In July 2025, the Department of Education, which Mr. Trump seeks to dismantle, issued guidance that encourages educators to “harness the potential of AI,” by utilizing “high-quality” AI instructional materials and deploying “AI-enhanced high-impact tutoring.” But the department has not set standards to help local officials vet these tools. In April 2025, Education Secretary Linda McMahon elicited cackles from the administration’s critics when she mistakenly referred to AI as “A1” in a speech at Arizona State University.
Without federal standards, more than 30 states have adopted their own guidelines. A few, including Wyoming and North Carolina, have provided districts with robust frameworks to balance the technology’s promise with its peril.
Part of Wyoming’s guidance is a video on the state’s Department of Education website titled “Threat Assessment.” It begins with a warning: AI is “already here,” it says, “inside the ed tech tools you’re probably already paying for,” before adding that without federal standards “this job just got harder,” because “all the responsibility for checking every single tool for safety, for privacy, for whether it even works, that now falls squarely on you.” The video then lays a laundry list of red flags – from apps that collect data on students to those that target them with advertisements to those that may harm their ability to learn.
Wyoming’s Department of Education also provides vetting tools to districts. One of them, developed by Project Unicorn, a consortium of nonprofit organizations and school associations, is a chatbot that evaluates other AI applications. Project Unicorn’s website includes its own disclaimer: “While every effort has been made to ensure accuracy and relevance, please treat all information as guidance and informational rather than final legal, technical or purchasing advice.”
The lack of clarity around the new technology has opened the door for corruption, some worry.
On June 21, Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho resigned after his home was raided by the FBI amid an investigation into a district contract for an AI chatbot. Two weeks later in New York, Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels asked principals to pause purchases of AI software after New York City Council members demanded a moratorium on AI’s use in schools “until rigorous guardrails can be developed with public and expert input, to prevent serious damage to NYC children and their future.” A broader petition seeking a two-year moratorium on generative AI use in the city schools has generated thousands of signatures.
In Silicon Valley, a rising cadre of founders offers a far sunnier vision of AI’s impact on education, exhibiting characteristically brash…
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