IBL News | New York
OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft are providing millions of dollars for AI training to the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers union.
Their goal is to keep teachers relevant and help students use the technology wisely. The common goal is to train America’s future workforce.
“We are preparing kids for the future. That is our primary job. And AI, like it or not, is part of our world,” say teachers.
In exchange, the tech companies have an opportunity to make inroads into schools and win over students in the race for AI dominance.
“There is no one else who is helping us with this. That’s why we felt we needed to work with the largest corporations in the world,” AFT President Randi Weingarten said. “We went to them — they didn’t come to us.”
Under the arrangement announced in July, Microsoft is contributing $12.5 million to AFT over five years. OpenAI is providing $8 million in funding and $2 million in technical resources, and Anthropic has offered $500,000.
With the funds, AFT plans to build an AI training hub in New York City that will offer virtual and in-person workshops for teachers. The goal is to open at least two more hubs and train 400,000 teachers over the next five years.
Meanwhile, the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, announced its own partnership with Microsoft last month. The company has provided a $325,000 grant to help the NEA develop AI trainings in the form of “microcredentials” — online trainings open to the union’s 3 million members, said to Reuters Daaiyah Bilal, NEA’s senior director of education policy. The goal is to train at least 10,000 members this school year.
The unions own the intellectual property for the trainings, which cover safety and privacy concerns alongside AI skills.
The Trump administration has encouraged private investment, recently creating an AI Education Task Force as part of an effort to achieve “global dominance in artificial intelligence.”
The federal government urged tech companies and other organizations to foot the bill. So far, more than 100 companies have signed up.
Beyond training teachers. Microsoft unveiled a $4 billion initiative to fund AI training and research, and to gift its AI tools to teachers and students. It includes the AFT grant and a program that will give all school districts and community colleges in Washington, Microsoft’s home state, free access to Microsoft CoPilot tools.
Google says it will commit $1 billion to AI education and job-training programs, including free access to its Gemini for Education platform for U.S. high schools.
In their sessions, teachers generate lesson plans using ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft CoPilot, and two AI tools designed for schools, Khanmigo and Colorín Colorado.
They even find ways to engage bored learners with AI-graded classwork instantly, turning lesson plans into podcasts or online storybooks, or generating images and creating illustrated flashcards in English and Spanish to teach vocabulary.
