On July 8, the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers’ union in the United States, announced it would launch a $23 million artificial intelligence training initiative for educators — funded by OpenAI, Microsoft and Anthropic — dubbed the National Academy for AI Instruction. The New York–based effort will offer workshops this fall to show teachers how to use AI tools for tasks like “generating lesson plans.”

Framed as innovative and empowering, this partnership is anything but. In truth, it’s a corporate public relations stunt — and a betrayal of the foundational principles of organized labor.

The academy’s backers don’t even hide the true motive. Venture capitalist Roy Bahat, who first proposed the idea, posted that if we can figure out how to train teachers to use AI, “maybe we can figure it out for other occupations.” Translation: Teachers are guinea pigs in Big Tech’s broader project to reengineer labor, one profession at a time.

That AFT is not only complicit but celebrating this shift is shameful. Unions exist to protect workers from corporate exploitation, not to usher in the tools of their replacement. They emerged from workers recognizing that their strength lies in numbers. Employers — backed by immense wealth and power — could only be forced to improve wages, benefits and conditions when faced with collective resistance: strikes, boycotts and solidarity. People literally died fighting for the right to organize.

But since the 1970s, labor has been under siege. Both political parties helped dismantle union power. Democrats, especially under Bill Clinton’s “Third Way” politics, sold out labor for corporate donors — cutting regulations, taxes and social programs, and weakening protections, while dressing it up with socially liberal talking points. The result? A generation of workers trained to focus on identity politics while ignoring the structural power of corporations.

This shift hit education hard. Public schools and universities became increasingly reliant on corporate dollars and increasing tuition costs to pay for the reduction in tax funds received by the institution. In the process, education’s civic mission — producing thoughtful, engaged citizens — was gutted. Instead, schools were refashioned as job-training pipelines. Students became customers. Faculty became disposable. Adjunctification exploded as full-time, tenure-track positions were replaced by lower-paid and often part-time roles (known as adjuncts), forcing faculty to teach two to three times a full-time load across multiple campuses just to make a living — and possibly earn benefits. Meanwhile, higher education experienced administrative bloat,  meaning a dramatic increase in the ratio of managers to faculty that saw members of the professional managerial class — people who rarely if ever step foot in a classroom or produce scholarship — tell scholars and teachers how to do their jobs.

This managerial class promoted ideological compliance under the guise of “meritocracy” and “diversity.” You could critique race, gender or sexuality — but challenge corporate power or neoliberal logic and you were branded out of touch, problematic or worse. Higher education became a safe space for Clintonian technocrats: progressive on culture, pro-corporate on economics. And, tragically, many of these people now run unions.

Anyone who understands labor history should see this AFT-Big Tech alliance for what it is: a Trojan horse. AI companies aren’t trying to “help teachers.” They’re trying to infiltrate public education, lock in long-term influence and normalize surveillance capitalism for the next generation.

Big Tech has already reshaped the economy by undermining workers’ rights and security. Companies like Uber and TaskRabbit rely on business models that erode job stability, shift risk onto individuals and avoid regulation. Despite promises that technology would create a better and more prosperous future, many who rely on platforms like Airbnb and Lyft are far from wealthy. Instead, they often have to let strangers into their homes or cars just to make ends meet — juggling multiple gigs in a way that contrasts sharply with earlier, unionized generations who could support a household on a single income. Artificial intelligence represents the next phase of this ongoing project to extract more from workers while giving them less in return.

Technologists such as Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin, both of whom are close to the Trump administration, have been openly hostile to the idea of humans living in a democracy. They want rule by “experts” — preferably machines. AI, as currently deployed, isn’t intelligent; it’s predictive, biased and extractive. It gathers data, replicates prejudice and makes decisions based on past patterns — not human judgment or ethics. Even as research shows AI harms cognition, lacks privacy, exceeds humans in manipulating users in online discourse and performs most tasks poorly, it’s already being used to decide benefits, calculate tariffs, sentencing and health care.

Big Tech’s push into education isn’t about learning. It’s about market capture. Schools offer a captive, young audience — ready to be mined for data, shaped into obedient users and sold to advertisers. These AI companies don’t want to “teach students about AI.” They want to define AI for them — framing it as inevitable, neutral and beneficial. They certainly won’t highlight its limitations, dangers or environmental toll.

They won’t teach that AI reflects the biases of its creators. They won’t teach that “AI” today is little more than a marketing label for probabilistic autocomplete systems. They won’t highlight examples like xAI’s Grok promoting Hitler rhetoric, or how AI routinely fails basic logical reasoning. And they won’t teach students how algorithmic systems entrench inequality or why surveillance-based models are fundamentally at odds with democratic education.

As shocking as AFT’s sellout is, it’s not the first time AFT President Randi Weingarten, who spent about three years as a full-time teacher, collectively, in her career, has cozied up to corporate power. Under her leadership, AFT has backed NewsGuard, a military-industrial-adjacent “news literacy” tool, and co-hosted an AI conference between AFT and Microsoft that turned out to be a Big Tech trade show. I was there. It wasn’t education — it was marketing.

This latest deal couldn’t have happened without her. As Bahat told Time magazine, “The critical thing here is that it was led by a worker organization. Randi and the AFT really drove this process.”

Let’s be clear: Any union that signs off on corporate control of the classroom isn’t defending education — it’s selling it off. It’s not just shortsighted. It’s reckless. It undermines labor. It undermines public education. And it hands over power to some of the most anti-worker, anti-democratic corporations in existence. If the AFT stays on this path, it won’t just become irrelevant — it will forfeit the right to call itself a labor union. We can’t build a just society by aligning with the very forces hollowing it out.

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