As Congress Fails to Take Action on AI, AFT and Microsoft Reach ‘First-of-Its-Kind’ Deal to Protect Kids

Por Julia Conley — Common Dreams

The advocacy group Fairplay on Wednesday applauded education union leaders for spearheading efforts to ensure students and teachers in the US are protected by safety and privacy standards as artificial intelligence companies push for their products to be used in schools.

But the organization’s executive director, Josh Golin, emphasized that the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and United Federation of Teachers (UFT) “should never have been in this position in the first place,” and Congress and states should have already passed legislation to create “industry-wide standards that are enforceable through attorneys general and a private right of action.”

“With our elected leaders failing to live up to their responsibilities, we are left with an agreement that places an unfair burden on schools and doesn’t do enough to keep kids safe,” said Golin.

The deal reached Wednesday was between AFT, UFT, and Microsoft, so it will pertain only to the Silicon Valley giant’s AI products.

It includes 10 “legally enforceable protections,” reported Politico, including a commitment from Microsoft not to use student or teacher data to train AI models, except in narrow “safety and security” circumstances.

Other requirements of the deal include:

• Microsoft can only collect, process, or store data that is strictly necessary to deliver an educational product;
• All covered data, including every prompt, response, file, and AI-generated output, belongs exclusively to the school and students;
• All tools support educators and students and do not replace human judgment; and
• The company and schools must be transparent with families about how AI is being used.

AFT said the “first-of-its-kind” agreement came after months of painstaking negotiations “in the absence of any meaningful federal and state rules governing artificial intelligence in schools.”

The deal was announced on the same day that Jacob Coxon, a researcher at AI firm Anthropic, resigned in protest of an industry that he said is pushing to build “superhuman systems” without guardrails.

He told The Wall Street Journal he was “worried such systems could spiral out of control and destroy humanity.”

Coxon’s warning intensified calls for Congress to pass legislation to rein in AI, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) proposed moratorium on AI data centers and his bill, introduced with Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), to ban artificial superintelligence.

Bipartisan legislation has also failed to pass.

More than 80% of Americans believe the government is not doing enough to regulate AI, according to one recent NBC poll, and President Donald Trump has joined the industry in pushing to block states from passing their own regulations.

Randi Weingarten, president of AFT, said the unions had “forged a hard-fought, ironclad privacy agreement with real teeth that protects students and families, because no one else, including the federal government, has stepped up to do the real work.”

“We can get angrier and angrier, or we can act decisively; anything less than legally enforceable provisions is simply a wish list,” said Weingarten.

Golin emphasized that the deal “elides the most important question of all: Should student-facing AI products be used in schools at all?”

“There is no evidence that AI products are effective teaching tools for children and growing evidence that they undermine learning and create a number of risks for kids,” said Golin. “That’s why Fairplay and its network of experts are calling on schools to implement a five-year pause on all [generative] AI products until it can be determined whether those products are safe for young people and beneficial to their education.”

“We hope this agreement does not fool schools into thinking that GenAI products are safe and effective for use with schoolchildren or hoodwink policymakers into thinking legislation restricting AI use in schools is not needed,” he added. “It also places the burden on schools to execute and enforce the contract, which they are not in a position to do, and which should be the job of regulators.”

Fonte: Common Dreams