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Amid all of this, Silicon Valley is doubling down on its push to integrate AI into schools. In the lead-up to final exams last spring, nearly every major AI firm offered college students free (or heavily discounted) access to their paid chatbots. Now the tech industry is offering students cheap access to their agentic tools. Last summer, Anthropic announced “Claude Builder Clubs”—an initiative in which students paid by the AI company host workshops and hackathons on their campuses. In exchange for membership in those clubs, students are given free access to Claude Code. A few weeks ago, OpenAI announced that it would be offering college students $100 worth of credits for Codex, its agentic coding tool.

The students affiliated with the AI companies, at least, say that the more powerful bots are helping them with their studies. Thor Warnken, an Anthropic ambassador and a biology major at the University of Florida, told me that he has designed what is effectively a personalized Khan Academy. When he takes a practice test—say, in organic chemistry—he feeds his completed work into Claude. He then asks the bot to find patterns in his errors and make new practice problems based on them. “The first practice question will be super easy, and the next one will get a little harder and a little harder, until it gets super hard,” he explained. Liu, who also serves as an ambassador for Anthropic, similarly said that the bot has made for a “fantastic” study partner. When he has questions during large lectures, he asks Claude, which has access to his course materials, and the bot explains concepts in real time; previously, those questions might have gone unanswered.

Instructors, as I have previously written, are also using plenty of AI. Canvas recently introduced a new AI teaching agent designed to save instructors time on “low educational value tasks” such as organizing online-course modules and adjusting assignment due dates. “Faculty are using AI tools both for instructional purposes, for building course materials, but they’re also starting to play around with generative AI to actually grade and assess the learning,” Marc Watkins, a researcher at the University of Mississippi who studies AI and education, told me. He gave a hypothetical: “I could set my agent up, open it up in my course, go out on campus to walk across campus to get a cup of coffee at Starbucks,” he said. By the time he returned, 15 minutes later, all of the essays would be graded, and “bespoke personal feedback” would be sent out to each student. AI can save teachers time—that same grading takes him 10 or 12 hours, Watkins estimated—but in the process, the technology threatens the relationship between students and teachers that is core to education. “That’s really scary,” he said.