AI That Does College For You Got Shut Down. Why It Won’t Matter
By Dan Fitzpatrick
Einstein AI did every assignment in a college course automatically, but the real crisis isn't the technology. It's an system that made the bot's job easy.
Last week, a product appeared that has shaken higher education. Einstein AI is built by Advait Paliwal, a Michigan State University 2024 graduate, and it has been marketed as a total digital proxy for students.What that means is it logs into Canvas, which is used by half of North American colleges and colleges around the world. The artificial intelligence agent can then watch lectures on behalf of students. It reads essays and it writes papers automatically. It also posts in discussion boards with contextual replies and submits assignments before deadlines without any student input. It was billed as the AI that does college for you.The site was taken down last week by a cease and desist. The takedown was for trademark infringement, not its actual capability. As you can imagine, the platform went viral and the educator response was panicked, adversarial, and reactive.The Technology Behind Einstein AIThe tech behind Einstein AI was nothing new if you've been following AI developments. It is part of a wave of new agentic capabilities that emerged at the end of 2025 and early 2026. These include open source platforms like OpenClaw, which took the tech world by storm in January. In fact, the creator of Einstein AI, Paliwal, called it OpenClaw as a student.OpenClaw is an open-source agentic AI framework and was one of the fastest-growing GitHub repositories in history. The agent receives a goal, navigates its environment, and then executes steps. It makes small decisions on its own to complete the user’s request and can use computer software, platforms, and browsers to get the job done.Right now, the technical barrier is modest. But it is dropping fast. Within a year, we will likely see something like this as a basic browser extension.So why does shutting Einstein down change nothing about the new landscape? The commercial product might be gone, but the open source capabilities remain permanent. Anybody with a small amount of technical ability will be able to create...