Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

Anthropic, OpenAI, Google’s Gemini, and Microsoft continue targeting the $6 trillion global education market, as a report by Morgan Stanley quantified.

“For the world’s biggest AI labs, education represents both a chance to help society adapt to the seismic changes their inventions are bringing, and an enormous business opportunity,” the Financial Times reported.

• Anthropic has just launched Claude for Teachers, a free tool aimed at K-12 teachers in the US. It also promotes “Claude for Education” for university teachers and students.

• OpenAI has ChatGPT for Teachers — a free, self-serve offer for verified US K-12 teachers and staff. It also offers ChatGPT Edu, a discounted enterprise subscription aimed at universities.

• Google has a suite of tools based around its Gemini models for educational institutions.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic espouse a “Socratic” approach to learning, turning chatbots into tutors that guide critical thinking. For K-12 teachers, they provide tools intended to help them plan lessons and assignments and provide automated reports on students.

Meanwhile, Microsoft and Google, which have longstanding relationships with many universities through their cloud services, are incorporating their AI tools into their education offerings with more powerful tools for higher-tier, paid plans.

All of this offers a threat to edtech companies that so far have chosen to partner with the frontier labs building the big foundation AI models, rather than fight them.