An interview with Leah Belsky, OpenAI's VP of Education, as the startup competes with Google and others to offer premium AI tools to universities and students
OpenAI, the firm that helped spark chatbot cheating, wants to embed A.I. in every facet of college. First up: 460,000 students at Cal State.
New York TimesNatasha Singer
Context & Ripple Effects
OpenAI had already established a university-sales precedent through its ChatGPT Enterprise agreement with Arizona State University, including plans for personalized tutors. Cal State makes that education push a much larger test of whether a campus can use a premium AI service across everyday academic activity.
Cal State's 460,000 students become OpenAI's first stated large-scale college audience, giving the company a live deployment for its education-focused premium tools.
OpenAI gains a direct route into university workflows and student usage, while Cal State must operationalize AI access across a large and varied campus system.
Second-order effects
Google and other AI providers face greater pressure to package models, administration, and student-facing features for institution-wide procurement rather than individual users.
A broad campus rollout makes AI policy, teaching practice, and support operations immediate concerns for universities, not merely questions of students independently using chatbots.
Third-order effects
If large systems continue to procure AI this way, higher education could become a durable distribution channel in which a few platform vendors compete to become embedded infrastructure.
Multi-vendor arrangements at Cal State suggest universities may try to preserve choice even as workflow integration raises the cost of replacing a provider.
The trend: Universities are shifting from reacting to student chatbot use toward procuring AI as managed, campus-wide infrastructure.
Colleges have a real opportunity to differentiate themselves by declaring that *their* students—unlike those at institutions embracing GenAI—will get actual educations. Surely parents would be more enthusiastic about paying for their kids' degrees at those colleges!
Insofar as higher education wants even to maintain the pretense of developing critical thinking skills, they should resist these encroachments with righteous conviction.
At this point, I would suggest as a general rule that the greater the embrace of this kind of approach to generative AI, the less invested the institution is in students actually learning something or having genuinely meaningful experiences. Students beware. www.nytimes.com/2025…
“'Our vision is that, over time, A.I. would become part of the core infrastructure of higher education,' Leah Belsky, OpenAI's vice president of education, said in an interview.” 🫠
Not mentioned in the article is that these AI companies are receiving money from & partnering w authoritarian police states + building data centers for them. These partnerships are antithetical to academic freedom and to democracy writ large. https://www.nytimes.com/...
OpenAI, the company whose ChatGPT tool helped spark chatbot cheating, wants to embed A.I. in every facet of university life. Here's what the company told me about its plans to conquer campuses. https://www.nytimes.com/...
While I have taught about A.I. and used A.I. in the classroom in the past, this fall I will be emphasizing those things that machines can't do for me: conversation, contemplation, commentary. https://www.nytimes.com/...