According to The Verge AI, Microsoft has reached an agreement with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and its New York chapter, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), on ten safety and privacy principles for AI in schools.
The principles can be enshrined in contracts by school districts that choose to adopt them. The agreement comes one week after reports of bans on student-facing AI in two major school systems.
The significance of the agreement depends on its future application: the source does not specify the content of all ten principles, the number of schools or districts that have already adopted them, or the mechanism for monitoring compliance with the rules.
editorial commentary
Why it matters
The likely consequence is an increased role for contractual rules in the deployment of AI in schools. The next observable signal will be the adoption of these principles by specific school districts or the publication of their full content. Significant uncertainty remains regarding the control mechanism and the actual scale of deployment.