The Gates Foundation is spending $400 million on AI in schools. Teachers warn it could ‘end up widening’ the divide it’s meant to close

This week, the Gates Foundation announced a $1 billion commitment to build and deliver equitable AI tools to schools, frontline health care workers, farmers, and more.

Of that commitment, 40% will go toward education, including AI tutoring to individualize learning in classrooms both in the U.S. and abroad.

That’s a whopping $400 million infusion into schools for a tool that’s only been around (at least commercially) for a handful of years.

The AI push is part of a broader U.S. education strategy the foundation laid out in July, which aims to help up to 10 million more Americans earn “credentials of value” by 2045, the year the foundation plans to close .

And it comes at a time when the value of classroom technology is being questioned.

Test scores have dropped among some students over the same time period since computer assessments were widely implemented.

Meanwhile, research shows that ever since the U.S. spent $30 billion to swap textbooks for laptops, Gen Z has shown to be less cognitively capable than previous generations, according to written testimony by neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath presented to the U.S.

Senate Committee on Commerce earlier this year.

“Evidence indicates that indiscriminate digital expansion has weakened learning environments rather than strengthened them,” he wrote.

The skepticism is already shaping policy.

On Sept.

2, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels announced what the city called the nation’s broadest moratorium on student-facing generative AI.

It’s a one-year pause for students in 2-K through 8th grade, affecting nearly 600,000 students, or roughly two-thirds of the system.

“The tech industry wants us to believe that AI-powered early education is not only inevitable, but necessary,” Mamdani said in a statement.