Within the span of a single week last month, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten both signed an artificial intelligence safety agreement with Microsoft — the company that provides financial backing for the union's own AI training academy — and took the stage at the "Pro-Human Assembly" in Washington to present it.
The gathering, organised around a shared position against artificial intelligence, brought onto one platform a wide-ranging mix of voices — Steve Bannon, Amy Kremer, who was present at the Capitol on January 6th, Bernie Sanders, and AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler — representing perspectives from across the political spectrum.
The document unveiled on September 9 by Weingarten and Microsoft Vice Chair Brad Smith was a memorandum of agreement between Microsoft and the AFT's National Academy for AI Instruction — an organisation that receives its funding from Microsoft — with Weingarten describing its provisions as binding and enforceable.
The agreement was reached without any input from union educators, who were neither given a vote nor brought into the discussion beforehand.
The arrangement bars Microsoft from feeding student and teacher data into its AI training pipelines, yet the exemptions built into the agreement's own language cover productivity software, collaboration tools, and cloud services — a carve-out that places Microsoft 365, Copilot, Teams, and Azure beyond those protections, even though those four platforms are the ones schools routinely depend on.
Protections under the agreement apply to districts only when formally requested, the school-side signatory is limited to the AFT's Academy, and the arrangement is set to lapse within two years. Rules targeting AI use in grading, discipline, or student monitoring fall on educators rather than placing any obligations on Microsoft.
The National Academy for AI Instruction opened on July 8, 2025, eight days after Microsoft and OpenAI signed the White House's "Pledge to America's Youth." Weingarten noted that her organisation had approached the companies rather than the other way around.
Backed by pledges of $12.5 million from Microsoft, $10 million from OpenAI, and $500,000 from Anthropic — totalling $23 million across five years — the academy has set out to bring 400,000 educators up to speed on those three companies' tools.
The Academy sits within the broader Microsoft Elevate initiative — a $4 billion commitment that channels the company's own software licences and cloud credits into educational institutions, equips and certifies teachers in Copilot use, and embeds AI tools within lesson planning and assessment workflows. Two unions — the AFT and the AFL-CIO — hold the role of labour partner within Elevate's organisational structure.
The Elevate launch came seven days after Microsoft eliminated 9,000 positions, at a point when the company's data centre expansion is on track to draw roughly $190 billion in capital spending across the current year.
Addressing legislators in 2009, Bill Gates described the Common Core standards as a vehicle for building "a large uniform base of customers eager to buy products," after which the Gates Foundation directed roughly $200 million toward promoting those standards and channelled more than $10 million to the American Federation of Teachers between 2009 and 2014 to advance their adoption among educators. Prior to that period, the same foundation had directed $135 million toward charter school development, while a separate estimate placed the combined annual outlay of the Gates and Walton foundations at upward of $500 million for education-related programmes. Records show that no fewer than 4,000 state-funded schools closed their doors over the five-year span from 2009 through 2014.
Adoption of artificial intelligence tools among educators has grown to the point where the practice has become routine across classrooms. Data gathered by Gallup for the 2024–25 academic year put the figure at three in five respondents who drew on AI for their own professional tasks.
Spending cuts have taken effect across more than half of the country's 50 largest school districts in the current academic year, with hundreds of individual campuses slated for closure. County officials have put Los Angeles on notice that its finances — already strained by plans to cut close to 6,000 positions — may not support payroll obligations through November 2027.
The Education Department's workforce was reduced by half under the administration, while roughly $7 billion in school funding remained on hold for several weeks during the previous summer. A federal tax credit covering private school tuition — drawing participation from 31 states — is set to launch under its inaugural nationwide structure on January 1.
Weingarten took part in the Pro-Human Assembly on September 15, sharing the platform with Bannon and Kremer. The AFT leader framed the Microsoft agreement as a template for bipartisan cooperation achievable outside existing legislation, argued that workers across the country deserved a share of the nation's economic gains, and described the union's conversations with GM, Siemens, Micron, and Meta about career pathways designed to connect students with employment opportunities at those companies. When Bannon put forward a call to remove Chinese nationals from AI research facilities in the United States, no response came from her.
In September 2021, Weingarten joined Jay Bhattacharya — one of the authors behind the Great Barrington Declaration, a document that advocated allowing widespread infection among healthy populations as a path to herd immunity — as co-host of a town hall organised by Open Schools USA. Bhattacharya has since been appointed by Trump to lead the National Institutes of Health. Pediatric cases tied to Long COVID have climbed to an estimated one million across the United States, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Some labour advocates have called for teachers to form independent, school-level committees — answerable neither to union hierarchies nor to either of the two dominant political parties — that would shape how AI tools are brought into classrooms, resist workforce reductions or facility closures tied to the technology's rollout, and examine the surveillance capabilities built into commercially produced educational software.
