Teachers Are Getting AI Training. Their Union Took $23 Million From Big Tech To Pay For It.

Key points

• The American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest US teacher unions, accepted $23 million from AI companies to fund classroom AI training programmes.
• New York City teachers attended hands-on sessions in 2025 designed to teach both how AI works and how to stop students from using it to avoid thinking.
• The funding arrangement has drawn criticism from educators and labour advocates who question whether a union should take money from the industry it is meant to hold accountable.
• Some teachers view AI as a direct threat to learning and want training that helps them fight back, not adapt.

Darius Saczuk does not trust AI. The New York City high school teacher spent a day earlier this year sitting in a windowless downtown Manhattan conference room, surrounded by dozens of colleagues, learning how to use it anyway. His logic is blunt: know your enemy.

The training session was part of a push by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), a union representing roughly 1.7 million members across schools, universities and public services, to get its members ready for a classroom where AI, the technology behind tools like ChatGPT, is already present whether teachers want it or not.

Who is paying for this?

The $23 million funding pot comes from AI companies. That fact alone has caused friction. Critics argue that a labour union, whose job is to protect workers from harm including harms that new technology can cause, should not take large cheques from the very firms building that technology.

The AFT says the money lets it run training at a scale it could not otherwise afford. Supporters point out that teachers are going to encounter AI regardless, so it is better to enter that situation informed.

Sceptics are less convinced. Accepting industry cash, they say, can quietly shape what the training covers and what it leaves out.

What does the training actually cover?

The sessions aim to give teachers two things: a working understanding of how AI tools function, and practical strategies for keeping students from using those tools as a shortcut instead of actually learning.

For a teacher like Saczuk, the second part matters most. His concern is not that AI is complicated. His concern is that it makes it too easy for a student to hand over their thinking to a machine.

That worry is widely shared. A large language model, the kind of AI that can write an essay or solve a maths problem on request, does exactly what a struggling student might wish it would do: produce a finished answer with almost no effort required from the person asking.

What does this mean for students and parents?

For now, the training is aimed at teachers, not classrooms. But the downstream effect lands on students. A teacher who understands how AI generates text is better placed to spot when a submitted essay was not actually written by a student, and to design assignments that are harder to outsource to a machine.

Parents should expect schools to keep wrestling with this openly for the next few years. There is no settled answer yet on how much AI belongs in a classroom, or on whose terms.

As The Guardian reported, the partnership between the AFT and AI firms continues to stir debate inside the union movement itself. That debate is worth watching. How teachers are prepared for AI, and who funds that preparation, will shape what learning looks like for a generation of students.

Common questions

Is AI being used to teach children directly?

Not in these sessions. The current training targets teachers, giving them tools to understand AI and manage how students interact with it, not to deploy AI as a teaching tool itself.

Can AI really write a student's homework for them?

Yes. Modern AI tools can produce essays, solve equations and answer comprehension questions in seconds. That is precisely why many teachers want training in how to detect and discourage it.