New York City bans AI for students through 8th grade

A stock photo of kids using their cell phones. — New York City has a ‘sweeping new policy’ for AI

(Image credit: Daniel de la Hoz / Getty Images)

What happened

New York City on Wednesday announced that AI tools will be banned in public grade and middle schools and sharply limited for high school students. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office called the one-year moratorium the country’s “most expansive” limits on AI in schools. The “sweeping new policy” for the nation’s largest school district will also bar individual screens for students until third grade, The New York Times said. “So-called companion chatbots” will be “banned in all grades,” and “all high schoolers will be taught about AI literacy.”

“The tech industry wants us to believe that AI in early education is not only inevitable, but that it is necessary,” Mamdani said in a speech Wednesday. “We do not see it that way.” A “backlash” from parents “against the growing use of digital devices and AI in the classroom” has pushed many school districts to enact new restrictions, the Times said. The Los Angeles school district — the nation’s second-largest — just began “temporarily blocking access to generative AI tools on student devices across all grades,” The Associated Press said. Other schools are “working to teach children how to incorporate the technology while preventing them from relying too heavily on it or using it to cheat.”