Anthropic, Google and Microsoft fight to win teachers

The next major artificial intelligence (AI) battleground is the classroom, as Google, Microsoft and Anthropic race to make their tools the chatbots of choice for teachers and students.  After early resistance, the floodgates are opening. When students began using ChatGPT for homework in late 2022, chatbots were widely seen as cheating tools to be banned or blocked. Now, across K–12 and higher education, that resistance is giving way to a broader acceptance that AI is here to stay—and that avoiding it could leave students unprepared for what comes next. Anthropic recently said it will bring AI tools and training to more than 100,000 educators in 63 countries through a partnership with Teach For All. Google—whose Classroom product has been a K–12 mainstay for more than a decade—announced its most aggressive AI-in-education push yet. New Gemini features include SAT practice tests vetted with the Princeton Review, NotebookLM integration for blended research, and Gemini-powered writing feedback via Khan Academy. Microsoft recently rolled out free AI training and premium software for educators and college students, offering credentials and scenario-based tools to integrate AI into teaching—from reducing special education admin to teaching AI with Minecraft.