Major technology companies that create artificial intelligence products—including Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI—are teaming up with the American Federation of Teachers to provide free AI teacher training.
The companies have pledged $23 million combined over five years to the effort, including the creation of a National Academy for AI Instruction, a brick-and-mortar facility in New York City. The facility will begin instruction with New York City educators this fall and then expand nationally.
The partnership will offer teachers continuing education credits, credentials and certifications, workshops, online courses, and training sessions. It will also provide continuous support and resources to keep educators in the loop on the latest AI advancements. The academy will use educator feedback and “actual classroom experiences” to tweak and improve its work.
Ultimately, the initiative plans to support 400,000 educators, according to the AFT, a 1.8-million-member union.
“Teachers are facing huge challenges, which include navigating AI wisely, ethically and safely,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of AFT, at an event held at the headquarters of the union’s New York City affiliate, the United Federation of Teachers, and streamed online.
When a powerful version of Open AI’s ChatGPT emerged in 2022, “we knew it would fundamentally change our world,” Weingarten said. “The question was whether we would be chasing it or whether we would try to harness it?”
The initiative will help educators better understand how the technology can be used for teaching and learning, explore issues related to student safety and privacy, and figure out how to help their students prepare for an economy in which AI tools will be used extensively, Weingarten said.
The approach will keep teachers—not the technology—at the center of instruction, she added. “Human beings, not the machine, are in charge of education, and that the tool should be one that is used by educators, by the public, by kids, not the other way around,” Weingarten said.
Are pledges enough to get real traction on AI training?
The AFT announcement comes on the heels of a White House-sponsored pledge signed by 68 businesses and nonprofit organizations—including two of the corporations partnering with AFT: Microsoft and OpenAI—to support the teaching of AI skills in schools.
The organizations are promising to “provide resources that foster early interest in AI technology, promote AI literacy and proficiency, and enable comprehensive AI training for educators,” according to a statement published by the Trump administration. (See the full statement and list of participating organizations here.)
More specifically, the organizations said they would offer “resources” in the form of “funding, grants, educational materials and curricula, technology and tools, workforce development resources and/or technical expertise and mentorship.”
The pledge does not include specifics, such as how much money an organization might provide and for whom, whether educational materials would be sold to families or school districts for profit or offered up free of charge, and how many hours companies might devote to providing technological know-how to educators.
The pledge also doesn’t say whether companies will work directly with public school districts, private schools, or families homeschooling their children.
Though it’s nice to see so many organizations publicly express interest in helping children and educators navigate AI, it would be better to see “fewer pledges and more proactive action [with companies saying] ‘here’s what we’re going to do,’” and the federal government checking to ensure that they aren’t making false promises about the safety or efficacy of particular products, said Amelia Vance, the president of the Public Interest Privacy Center, a nonprofit organization that aims to help educators safeguard student data privacy.
The funding that Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft are committing to the AFT initiative is more meaningful—there’s a clear dollar amount attached to it, Vance said.
“It’s nice to see money [put toward] this,” Vance said. But she also wants to see the companies “step up and not exaggerate what AI can and cannot do.”
And she hopes the AI training that teachers receive through the initiative makes it clear that there are plenty of ways educators can use AI tools without violating student data privacy. For instance, instead of saying: “I need an Individual Learning Progam for Bill Johnson, a 5th grader with dyslexia” teachers could say “please send five IEP reading goals for a 5th grader with dyslexia,” Vance said.
The White House pledge and AFT’s partnerships build on an overall trend toward more professional development in AI.
Over the past school year, a growing number of districts began training teachers on AI or encouraging them to experiment with the technology, research shows. The number of districts that trained teachers on generative AI more than doubled from 2023 to 2024, according to an analysis by the research and policy firm RAND Corp., released this spring.
In the fall of 2024, 48% of districts reported they had trained teachers on AI use—up from 23% in the fall of 2023. If districts follow their plans for the current school year, nearly three-quarters will have provided AI training to educators by the fall of 2025, RAND predicted.
