OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic—three of the biggest players in artificial intelligence have launched the nation’s first $23 million AI education initiative, aimed at equipping US educators with the tools and training needed to navigate the growing influence of AI in classrooms.
Announced on Tuesday, the investment will fund the creation of the National Academy for AI Instruction (NAAI), a program designed to train 400,000 K–12 teachers over the next five years. The initiative will offer free in-person workshops, hands-on seminars, and virtual learning modules to help educators effectively integrate AI into their teaching practices.
The training will cover using AI for tasks like lesson planning, grading, communication, and classroom management—enhancing, not replacing, the teacher’s role. The program is being launched in collaboration with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), one of the largest teachers’ unions in the country, underscoring strong support from within the education sector.
Microsoft is the lead investor in the project, signaling the tech giant’s growing focus on the education space. The initiative aims to empower teachers with the knowledge, skills, and confidence to use AI as a supportive tool, streamlining administrative work, boosting creativity, and freeing up more time for direct student engagement.
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The first stationary training location will be in Manhattan, NY, opening in late summer or early fall. The school will eventually grow to other physical locations throughout the country. Alongside in-person instruction, the academy will feature distance-learning sessions to ensure that even teachers in rural or underserved areas can take advantage of the resources.
A training program will introduce the technology and explain how it might be applied in real classroom settings, including the use of AI for tutoring, automating lesson plans, creating tailored assignments for students, and helping students who learn differently from the majority of their class. Sessions will also discuss AI ethics, bias, data privacy, and student safety — all of which are at the top of educators’ and parents’ minds.
“When it comes to AI in schools, the question is whether it is being used to disrupt education for the benefit of students and teachers or at their expense,” Chris Lehane, chief global affairs officer of OpenAI, said in a statement. “We want this technology to be used by teachers for their benefit, by helping them to learn, to think and to create.”
Tech companies accelerate AI education push
The new academy arrives as demand for AI in education continues to grow across the United States. In April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to establish a White House Task Force on AI Education that called for public-private partnerships to encourage AI literacy in K–12 education. It has emerged as one of the biggest fruits of that order yet.
Tech companies have been aggressively building up their presence in education. OpenAI has also worked with the California State University system to give AI tools to more than 500,000 students and faculty members.
Anthropic, which developed the Claude AI assistant, released Claude for Education on Wednesday, a customized version of its chatbot for higher education users, almost two months after the company made its official product debut.
Through its competitive Google for Education program, Google is still signing deals with public schools and universities to bring AI-powered tools for administration and learning.
Such moves are happening as there is a dawning realization that AI literacy is as important as digital literacy has become, especially for the next generation of students and workers. However, the speed with which things have changed has also stirred concerns about fairness, access, and misuse.
Dealing with that concern, the academy’s developers say they’re creating the program with teachers in every aspect. Responsible and inclusive use of AI in schools will be a blinkered target to ensure the technology positively impacts learning, not negatively.
