Anthropic, one of the major artificial intelligence developers, has launched a teacher version of its AI assistant Claude, becoming the latest technology company to market AI tools specifically to K-12 educators.
The teacher version of Claude—which will be free for at least a year—includes “a library of teaching skills, and a direct connection to evidence-based curricula, mapped to academic standards in all 50 states,” created in partnership with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Learning Commons, Anthropic announced on July 14. (The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provides support for Education Week’s coverage of education technology. Education Week retains sole editorial control over the content of that coverage.)
Claude for Teachers “stems from Anthropic’s broader efforts in education, focused on supporting teachers and improving learning outcomes for students,” said Drew Bent, Anthropic’s education lead, in an email to Education Week. “Teachers told us that the AI tools they were using were nice in theory, but in practice weren’t built to the teaching standards they’re held to.”
Anthropic joins other major tech companies providing AI tools to K-12 educators. OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teachers in November, and Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot have K-12 versions for schools. Ed-tech companies—such as Brisk Teaching, MagicSchool AI, and SchoolAI—have already been providing teacher-specific generative AI tools for a couple years now.
How Claude for Teachers works
Claude for Teachers is connected to academic standards across all 50 states through Learning Commons’ Knowledge Graph, so when teachers ask it to generate a lesson plan, it’s aligned to the standards, the company said. Learning Commons is the new name for CZI’s education initiative and aims to build AI infrastructure that better connects the way students learn to the tools they learn with.
The platform also provides “a set of tailored teaching skills grounded in learning science,” according to Anthropic’s announcement, such as generating lesson plans and differentiating an activity.
In addition, Anthropic is giving teachers access to its agentic AI tools, Claude Code and Cowork. With these tools, teachers could analyze class data to plan instruction by uploading student rosters, diagnostic data, and attendance; they could also schedule repeated tasks, like reviewing exit tickets at the end of each day, according to the press release.
Claude for Teachers data is not used for model training purposes and student information is protected in compliance with the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act requirements, the company said. Data privacy and cybersecurity are major concerns for districts, especially as they become a top target for hackers.
Teachers can get verified online using their school-issued email and uploading a document that shows their role, such as a school ID, contract, pay stub, or certificate. Teachers can sign up until June 30, 2027 for a full year of free access.
“We hope to continue to offer this for free in the future and beyond the first year,” Bent said. “Our education team doesn’t have revenue goals; we are focused on impact and improving student learning.”
Some skeptics aren’t impressed by what Anthropic has to offer.
Dylan Kane, a middle school math teacher at Lake County High School in Leadville, Colo., is unsure how much it matters for educators that an AI tool is connected to state standards.
“Knowing the standards themselves is way less important than knowing how they build off of last year’s standards and build toward future learning, or knowing how to break big standards down into manageable pieces,” Kane said in an email to Education Week.
Claude and other large language models “are already pretty good at this type of thinking when they’re prompted well, and mediocre at it when they’re asked for a generic lesson attached to a standard,” said Kane, who has spent a fair amount of time experimenting with ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Kane said he hasn’t tried Claude for Teachers yet.
“I find that in skilled hands these tools can help teachers a bit but not dramatically, but they risk de-skilling newer teachers,” Kane added.
Learning Commons’ and Anthropic’s internal research found that large language models are more useful when they have access to Knowledge Graph, which maps out the standards and its connections to other skills and concepts, said Sandra Liu Huang, the president of Learning Commons.
“Otherwise, AI is guessing on those connections versus knowing,” she said. “It’s pretty hard for a single teacher to keep all of that straight for every single student in the classroom, so having that data set underneath is helping the AI tool have much more granular and precise connections to give teachers a better result.”
Benjamin Riley, the founder and CEO of think tank Cognitive Resonance, which published a paper in 2024 about the educational hazards of generative AI, said he has tested Claude for Teachers a little bit. There are pre-made prompts for lesson planning, creating slide decks, differentiating an activity, and drafting newsletters. Teachers can also connect to other apps, such as Google Drive and Microsoft 365, Riley said.
“It doesn’t look any different than anything I’ve seen from OpenAI or from Google,” Riley said, after trying the pre-made lesson plan prompt. “There’s really no differentiator here.”
Still, Anthropic argues that its AI tool is more in line with what teachers really need. The company developed Claude for Teachers by listening and asking them what they really needed, Bent said.
“They told us that the AI tools they had to-date were great, but needed to be more relevant to what they were actually teaching, and that it didn’t help them uncover where kids really get stuck,” Bent said. “We provide access to evidence-based curriculum (Illustrative Math, OpenSciEd), standards, and learning progressions via Learning Commons and skills that we co-developed in a research and development loop with Learning Commons (and validated by teachers).”
Experts raise broader concerns about how tech companies are marketing AI tools
Others see potential benefits coming from Anthropic’s decision.
Mark Racine, a former district tech leader and classroom teacher for Boston Public Schools, was excited to see Anthropic enter the K-12 space because it brings competition, but he panned the company’s decision to “completely skip over the role of district leaders” in vetting and approving AI tools, he said.
The number of ed-tech products school districts use in a single school year surged during the pandemic, but districts are in the process of figuring out what to keep as they face tighter budgets, more cybersecurity threats, and screen-time concerns, said Racine, who now works as an ed-tech consultant.
For Anthrophic to market AI tools directly to teachers and encourage them to upload student data feels like a major oversight, he said. District leaders need to know how student data is being shared and managed, he said.
“We’re trying to get [teachers] to second-guess uploading data to a third-party tool,” Racine said. “There are federal and state laws that govern this stuff, and it has been a gray area that a lot of companies have kind of ignored for the last few years.”
Ed-tech companies can’t say on their own that they’re FERPA-compliant, because the federal law doesn’t govern them; it applies to school districts, said Amelia Vance, the president of the Public Interest Privacy Center, a nonprofit organization that aims to help educators safeguard student privacy.
A district has to tell an ed-tech company under which FERPA exception it’s citing to allow the company to access student information or whether it needs parental consent, Vance said. Very rarely can teachers consent to sharing student data with a third-party company under FERPA, she added.
“It is a district decision as to where its data is stored and how it’s shared and used,” Racine said. “Throwing around terms like ‘we’re FERPA-compliant’ just feels like a little bit more marketing and not as authentic as it needs to be.”
Teachers should always follow district policies on tech tools and student data, Bent said.
“For districts that are looking for more visibility and control, we are working on a district offering and will have more to share soon,” he added.
Tech companies need to understand that “district leadership needs to have a role,” Racine said. “I understand that sometimes it’s faster and easier to just go directly to teachers, but the stakes are too high, and we really need to roll back on a lot of this bottom-up, ground-up marketing that we’re seeing.”
As school districts balance the push to adopt the fast-evolving technology with the growing tech backlash, they should remember they have a lot of options in terms of AI tools, Racine said. District leaders need to be aware of what tools are being used by their teachers and what data is being uploaded to third-party providers.
“We owe that to our students,” he said. “We owe that to parents.”
