In a sweeping global movement, the world's largest technology corporations are forging partnerships with national governments to embed artificial intelligence directly into school systems. From India to El Salvador, a new wave of AI-powered educational tools is being deployed, promising to revolutionize learning while simultaneously sparking intense debate about its long-term impact on students.
The Global Surge of AI Classroom Partnerships
The pace of adoption has accelerated sharply. In early November 2025, Microsoft committed to supplying AI tools and training to over 200,000 students and educators in the United Arab Emirates. Shortly after, a financial services firm in Kazakhstan revealed a deal with OpenAI to provide the ChatGPT Edu service to 165,000 educators across the country.
Perhaps the most ambitious project was announced last month by Elon Musk's xAI. The company is collaborating with El Salvador to develop an AI tutoring system, powered by its Grok chatbot, intended for more than 1 million students in thousands of schools. This initiative highlights the scale at which tech giants are now operating within the education sector.
For India, a significant pledge has been made. OpenAI has committed to making its ChatGPT available to teachers in government schools across the nation. This move could potentially affect one of the world's largest student populations, placing India at the heart of the global experiment on AI in education.
Promises of Efficiency vs. Risks of Deskilling
American tech leaders champion these tools as a potential boon for learning. They argue that AI chatbots, capable of generating lesson plans, quizzes, and personalized content, can save teachers invaluable time, customize learning for individual students, and prepare youth for an AI-driven future economy.
However, children's advocacy groups and health experts are sounding alarms. A recent study from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found that popular AI chatbots may diminish critical thinking skills. The risks are multifaceted: AI can produce authoritative-sounding errors and misinformation, facilitate widespread cheating, and potentially harm student development.
This caution is informed by history. A previous global push for technology in education, the "One Laptop per Child" program, was studied extensively in Peru. Research showed it did not improve students' cognitive skills or academic outcomes, leading to concerns about wasted expenditure. UNICEF digital policy specialist Steven Vosloo warns that "unguided use of AI systems may actively de-skill students and teachers."
National Experiments: From Estonia's "AI Leap" to Iceland's Pilot
Countries are taking varied approaches to navigate this new terrain. In the United States, major school districts are rolling out tools independently. Florida's Miami-Dade County Public Schools introduced Google's Gemini chatbot to over 100,000 high school students, while Broward County provided Microsoft's Copilot to thousands of teachers.
Internationally, Microsoft partnered with Thailand's Ministry of Education to provide free online AI skills lessons for hundreds of thousands of students and training for 150,000 teachers.
Estonia offers a notable case study in proactive national policy. After a poll revealed over 90% of its high schoolers were already using chatbots like ChatGPT for schoolwork, the country launched "AI Leap." This initiative involved working with OpenAI to modify its Estonian-language service so it responds to student queries with questions, not direct answers. The program focuses on teaching educators and students about the uses, limits, biases, and risks of AI tools.
"It's critical AI literacy," said Ivo Visak, CEO of the AI Leap Foundation. "It's having a very clear understanding that these tools can be useful — but at the same time these tools can do a lot of harm."
Similarly, Iceland began a national AI pilot this school year, with several hundred teachers experimenting with Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude for tasks like lesson planning. Crucially, students are not yet using the chatbots in this pilot. Thordis Sigurdardottir, director of Iceland's Directorate of Education, expressed concern that over-reliance could diminish "whatever makes us more human."
Participating Icelandic teachers like Tinna Arnardottir and Frida Gylfadottir report the tools help create engaging lessons faster. However, Gylfadottir meticulously vets all AI-generated content for accuracy, acknowledging the risk of misinformation. Both teachers worry students outside school are already becoming overly trusting of AI, reinforcing their mission to teach critical assessment. "They are trusting AI blindly," Arnardottir observed. "We have to teach them how to learn with AI."
As this global race accelerates, rigorous, long-term studies on AI's effect on young minds are just beginning. Drew Bent, education lead at Anthropic, encapsulates the current moment: "We're at a point now where we need to make sure that these things are backed by outcomes and figure out what's working and what's not working." For India and the world, the classroom has become the newest frontier for AI, filled with both transformative potential and profound uncertainty.
